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Local community organisations, clubs, courses and programmesOwen Marshall
Owen Marshall is one of sixty authors attending The Press Christchurch Writers Festival from 4 to 7 September 2008.
Is Owen Marshall our best short story writer since Katherine Mansfield? Some people think so and certainly his work is exceptional. Born in Te Kuiti and educated at Canterbury University, he began his schoolteaching career in Timaru in the mid 1960s, teaching at schools in Timaru and Oamaru. He has also taught fiction writing at Aoraki Polytechnic.
Marshall has had eight collections of short stories published and a collection of his selected stories is coming out shortly. He has won a number of awards and his novel Harlequin Rex,which Patrick Evans praised for "its attention to the eternal verities as expressed in our common heritage of world literature", won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
His other novels have had a lot of praise: the 1995 A many coated man was described by Ian Dixon in the Christchurch Press as "among what must now be the thousands of novels I have read so far in my lifetime this one stands out in a special way". His recent novel Drybread is a moving and gripping tale of a woman who attempts to escape a court order by fleeing with her young son to a small town in Central Otago. As in all his work, the clear, precise and subtle writing draws the reader in.
