Elizabeth Knox is the author of nine novels for adults: After Z-Hour (1987), Treasure, (1992, shortlisted for the 1993 NZ Book Awards), Glamour and the Sea (1996), The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (Paremata 1989, Pomare 1994 and Tawa 1998), The Vintner’s Luck (1998), Black Oxen (2001), Billie’s Kiss (2002), Daylight (April 2003) and The Angel's Cut June 2009.
She has recently published Dreamhunter and Dreamquake (Harper Collins), a two book series for young adults. Dreamhunter won the 2006 Esther Glen Award for New Zealand children’s literature, and Dreamquake won an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Young Adult Literature in 2008. A collection of Elizabeth's nonfiction called The Love School: Personal Essays was published to acclaim in 2008. It was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in the Autobiography category.
She is one of New Zealand's most successful writers and has a
keen readership both in New Zealand and overseas.
Knox is a writer with a gift for describing the colour of the present moment…she lets her language breathe, lets it speak in revelations rather than explanations. Times Literary Supplement
Daylight had critics in the US comparing Knox to the Queen of the vampire
novelists saying Daylight is "on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer"
and calling it an "illuminating tour-de-force",
while Metro called it "mysterious, thrilling, erotic".
Her 2001 novel Black
Oxen was published simultaneously in the US, the UK and
New Zealand and was a NZ number one bestseller. Billie’s
Kiss made a spectacular entry into the NZ bestseller list
on the strength of one afternoon’s sales and then shot straight
to number one in the following list. Billie’s
Kiss was shortlisted in the 2002 Montana NZ Book Awards.
The book that Elizabeth is perhaps best known for is The Vintner’s
Luck, first published 1998, which was a huge bestseller in New Zealand. It has sold
over 45 000 copies in New Zealand and over 100,00 copies worldwide. The Vintner’s Luck was published in the US by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux and Picador US, and in the UK by Chatto &
Windus and Vintage.It has been published in German, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish and Hebrew. It
won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 1999 The
Montana NZ Book Awards, where it also received the Readers'
Choice and Booksellers' Choice awards. It was longlisted for the
1999 Orange
Prize for fiction (UK) The Vintner’s Luck won
the 2001 Tasmania
Pacific Region Prize, and is at present being made into a film by Niki Caro.
In honour of its tenth anniversary, a signed, numbered limited edition (1000 copies) of The Vintner's Luck has been published in November 2008.
Her sequel to The Vintner's Luck, The Angel's Cut has just been published.
Elizabeth has also won several personal awards and fellowships,
including the ICI Young Writers Bursary, a Scholarship in Letters
(1993) and was the Writing Fellow Victoria University Of Wellington in 1997. Elizabeth
Knox was an inaugural recipient of a Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2000. "Elizabeth Knox's achievement is already considerable with
the break-through success of The Vintner's Luck," says Arts
Foundation panel member and poet Bill
Manhire. "We believe she is about to become a major international
writer." In 2002 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM).
Elizabeth was born in 1959. She studied at Victoria
University of Wellington and attended Bill
Manhire's Creative Writing course. She lives in Wellington
with her husband and son.