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Craig Cliff
The moves in contemporary New Zealand short stories Common is the complaint that there is a sameness to the local writing being published, but specifics are harder to come by. Loosely inspired by HTMLGIANT’s list of [moves in contemporary (US) poetry] (http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/moves-in-contemporary-poetry/), this paper looks at the work of NZ writers of short fiction who started publishing after the year 2000, and asks: What are their go-to moves, both in terms of plot and composition? Where might they have come from? Is there anything distinctly New Zealand in any of this? Biography Craig Cliff is the 2017 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. His short story collection, A Man Melting won Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize and individual stories have been published in Essential New Zealand Stories, Best New Zealand Fiction, Ein Anderes Land, Griffith Review, Warwick Review, The Listener, Sport and elsewhere. His novel, The Mannequin Makers (2013) comes out in the US in September this year. |
