“We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater [or more critical] than the malice we ourselves feel in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.” So wrote Alain de Botton in How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Liz Calder’s reputation as a publisher is without equal. Not only did she launch the Harry Potter series in 1997 (after becoming co-founder of Bloomsbury in 1986), she also launched the careers of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Julian Barnes and Anita Brookner.
Kevin Ireland (pictured: ‘Self-portrait in a straw hat’) is a poet, short story writer, novelist, librettist and painter. He was born Kevin Jowsey in Auckland’s Mount Albert in 1933. When he was 24 he changed his surname to the name of the street he happened to be walking along at the time.
He’s been described as having “irrepressible humour, a stand-back imagination, a wondrous facility and control of the English language”. Paul Di Filippo is the author of hundreds of short stories — some of which have been anthologised in ‘The Steampunk Trilogy’, ‘Ribofunk’, ‘Fractal Paisleys’, ‘Lost Pages’, ‘Little Doors’, ‘Strange Trades’, ‘Babylon Sisters’ — and his novella, ‘A Year in the Linear City’.
A whole five minutes with a news reporting goddess — we should be so lucky. Which in fact we are. So, in our self-appointed role as the nation’s trendsetter, NZBC invited Pippa Wetzell over for a free-trade coffee so we could break our “men only” curse with five minutes of pure class. But then we got all tongue-tied and giggly.
David Mitchell’s first novel, ‘Ghostwritten’, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of British literature written by an author under 35, and was shortlisted for the Guardian ‘First Book Award’. His subsequent novels, ‘number9dream’ (“Blade Runner meets Jack Kerouac”) and ‘Cloud Atlas’ (“like Russian dolls”), were each shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003 he was selected as one of the literary magazine Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.
Seth Godin is known as “an agent of change”. Apparently, in 1994 he bravely predicted that the internet was a fad that wouldn’t last. We agree with him — we give it six months, tops. We’ve bought his books ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus’ and ‘Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable’ and we like the cut of his jib: “Have your readers do the marketing for you,” he suggests.
Peter Gordon (author of ‘Salads – The New Main Course’) was born in Wanganui and moved to Melbourne in 1981, where he cooked for five years before travelling through South-East Asia, which helped to inspire his fusion style. He returned to New Zealand to set up and run the kitchen of The Sugar Club in Wellington for owners Ashley Sumner and Vivienne Hayman, before moving to London in 1989.
Don McGlashan has five entries in the NZ’s Top 100 Songs Of All Time, as compiled by the Australasian Performing Rights Association. ‘Dominion Road’, ‘Anchor Me’ and a number of other McGlashan compositions are radio standards, as well as part of the nation’s cultural fabric and emotional memory. And it isn’t just a Kiwi thing.
One of “the top chefs in the world” is how Gordon Ramsay rates Thomas Keller, and gastronomic testimonials don’t come from many higher authorities than that. In 2001 ‘Time’ magazine named him “America’s best chef”. His flagship restaurant, The French Laundry, in Yountville in California’s Napa Valley has been called “the most exciting place to eat in the United States” and the Guide Michelin has awarded it three stars — its ultimate accolade, meaning “worth a special trip”.
