Alan Duff

Born on October 26, 1950, in Rotorua, New Zealand, Alan Duff is the son of Gowan Duff, a forestry scientist known as Pat, and Hinau Josephine Duff, known as Kuia, of Ngāti Rangitihi and Ngāti Tūwharetoa descent, and the grandson of Oliver Duff, founding editor of the New Zealand Listener. He grew up in a state housing area of the town, in a home stocked with his father's books and shaken by his mother's drinking. His parents separated when he was ten, and he went to live with a Māori uncle and aunt at Whakarewarewa. Expelled from Rotorua Boys' High School, he ran away and became a state ward at the Hamilton Boys' Home, went back to school in Christchurch while living with another uncle, the anthropologist Roger Duff, and at fifteen was sentenced to Waikeria Borstal for assault and breaking and entering. He installed sheet metal insulation and sang in a band, moved to England in the late 1970s to work as a barman and bar manager, and in 1979 was jailed there for nineteen months. In 1985 he began writing full-time. His first novel, Once Were Warriors (1990), a story of violence, drink and love in an urban Māori community told in juxtaposed interior monologues, won the PEN Best First Book Award, took second place at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards, and in 1994 became Lee Tamahori's film. A newspaper column and the polemic Māori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993) made him one of the country's most argued-over voices, urging Māori to stop waiting on the past and help themselves. In 1995 he was made an MBE and, with Christine Fernyhough, founded Books in Homes, which puts new books into the hands of poor children. The sequel, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, won the fiction prize at the 1997 Montana Book Awards, and Jake's Long Shadow (2002) completed the trilogy. He has also written a memoir, Out of the Mist and the Steam (1999), and Szabad (2001), a novel of the 1956 Budapest uprising, and has made his home in France.

Gowan Duff, the forestry scientist who filled the family home with books, lived to read his son's second novel, One Night Out Stealing. Asked what he thought of it, he gave nearly the last word he ever said to his son: powerful. Duff called it the greatest review he ever had, and dedicated every book to him.