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Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley i(A25149 works by) (a.k.a. Steve Daisley)
Born: Established: 1955
c
New Zealand,
c
Pacific Region,
;
Gender: Male
Heritage: New Zealander
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BiographyHistory

Stephen Daisley grew up on the North Island of New Zealand. He 'served in the New Zealand Army and worked at a variety of jobs in New Zealand and Australia including on sheep and cattle stations, cutting bush and scrub, driving trucks, doing road works and bar work, and on oil and gas construction sites'. Daisley later settled in Perth, Western Australia.

Source: Text Publishing website, http://textpublishing.com.au/
Sighted: 16/0/2011

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon A Better Place Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2023 26031842 2023 single work novel war literature

'In a novel of stark and lyrical beauty, award-winning author Stephen Daisley portrays the brutal effects of war on two New Zealand brothers.

'The old people in the district would often say that Roy was not quite the same after he come back. There was a brother. A twin brother, Tony. Tony Mitchell, different boy but a good rugby player. Bit of a mental case, they said, but Roy would have none of it. He always stayed close to Tony when they were growing up. They both went off to fight, must have been 1940. Only the one come back, though.

'Crete, they thought. We lost Tony over there.' (Publication summary)

2024 longlisted The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
2024 finalist New Zealand Book Awards New Zealand Post Book Awards Ockham New Zealand Book awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
y separately published work icon Coming Rain Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2015 8138809 2015 single work novel

'The contractor left a letter from their father and a white carton of tailor-made American cigarettes with a big red circle on them. Lucky Strike toasted. He would remember his mother holding the carton as she hugged him and told him to do his best. The crinkly sound of the cellophane. The other kids around them like chooks as he tried to say goodbye Mum.

'Western Australia, 1955. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning—whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change.

'Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why; of the profound satisfaction in hard work done with care, of love and friendship and the damage that both contain.' (Publication summary)

2016 shortlisted Voss Literary Prize
2016 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
y separately published work icon Traitor Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2010 Z1714727 2010 single work novel

'What would make a soldier betray his country?

'In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy's life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital.

'Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them.

'A bond so strong that David will betray his country for his friend.' (From the publisher's website.)

2011 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
2010 shortlisted Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Fiction
2011 winner Prime Minister's Literary Awards Fiction
2011 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
2011 shortlisted South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book
Last amended 4 Nov 2013 10:46:46
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