You Have a Lot to Lose
New Zealand’s most extraordinary literary everyman – poet, novelist, critic, activist – C. K. Stead told the story of his first twenty-three years in South-West of Eden. In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three.
It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s. And, at its heart, it is an account of a remarkable life among books – of writing and reading, critics and authors, students and professors.
From Booloominbah to Menton, The New Poetic to All Visitors Ashore, from Vietnam to the Springbok Tour, C. K. Stead’s You Have a Lot to Lose takes readers on a remarkable voyage through New Zealand’s intellectual and cultural history.
C. K. Stead is an award-winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand.
- ISBN-13
- 9781869409128
- Publisher
- Auckland University Press
- Imprint
- Auckland University Press
- Publication date
- 11 June 2020
- Format
- Hardback
- Pages
- 432
- Dimensions
- 210 x 140 mm
- Illustrations
- 8 pages image section
- Language
- English