Lloyd Jones 

Guest of the ilb 2007

Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, near the capitol city Wellington. He studied political science at Victory University. Afterwards he worked as a journalist and traveled extensively in the USA, Europe, and Asia. At age thirty he published his first novel, »Gilmor's Dairy« (1985), a tale of black humour about a young man in conflict with the traditions and everyday life of his small New Zealand hometown. Jones' particular interests lie with the unusual, absurd, and fantastic, which he presents as essential characteristics of reality. A preoccupation with the hidden absurdities of everyday life also characterizes his book »Swimming to Australia« (1991), and his novel-length travel journal »Biografi: An Albanian Quest« (1993). The latter paints a profound picture of Albania in the nineties, and it was listed among the best books of the year by the »New York Times«. It is based on Jones' trip to Albania in 1991, during which he embarked on the search for the toppled dictator Enver Hoxa's doppelganger, who through his role as double was deprived of his own biography.

Jones' »The Book of Fame« (2000) is another extraordinary account of real events. He explores the mechanisms of fame in a half-fictional telling of New Zealand's national rugby team »All Blacks« and their spectacular winning streak in Europe in 1905. In the novel »Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance« (2002) he turns to the Argentine tango, describing the intimacy and provocative power of this sensual dance through the story of a secret love affair between Louise and Schmidt.

Jones is also a children's book author, an editor, and an essayist. His most recent novel is the highly esteemed »Mister Pip« (2006), for which he received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize at the Calabash International Literary Festival last May in Jamaica. The book is set on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea in the civil war of the nineties, which the author witnessed as a journalist. The narrator is 13-year-old Matilda, whose teacher Mr. Watts reads Charles Dickens' novel »Great Expectations« aloud in class while the war is raging all around. More and more, the young listeners begin to relate the text to their own reality, and discover the imaginative (but also subversive) power of literature.

Jones, who is considered one of the leading contemporary novelists of New Zealand, has received many honours, including the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize and the Deutz Medal for Fiction. Since August 2007 he has been living in Berlin as a guest of the year-long programme »Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency«.

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