Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She has published about 120 titles (including school readers), and has written and adapted for television. Watts went on to publish more stories, including many which had originally appeared in the School Journal, now adapted to their new picture book format.īy the mid-1970s Mahy had added junior fiction to her repertoire by the early 1980s she was writing adolescent novels- at least one of which ( Memory, 1987) could have been marketed for adults. ‘It was one of those romantic things that happen,’ Mahy has said, although she in fact received another independent enquiry from America a few months later. In 1968 an American editor, Sarah Chockla Gross, discovered A Lion in the Meadow and in 1969 Franklin Watts in America published five Mahy stories as picture books, launching her international career. The Little Witch was the first to be accepted, and The Procession the first to be published (in 1961). Her work was rejected by commercial publishers in New Zealand (who were concentrating on explicitly New Zealand books for the local market), but many pieces were accepted by the School Journal. Working as a librarian and bringing up two daughters, Mahy continued to write stories and poems. In 1967 she began working for the School Library Service in Christchurch, and in 1976 was appointed Children’s Librarian at the Canterbury Public Library, a position she held until she resigned in 1980 to become a full-time writer.

In 1956 she entered the New Zealand Library School in Wellington, and with her Diploma (1958) went on to embrace librarianship with enthusiasm, taking a position at Petone Public Library.įor personal reasons she moved to Ohariu, near Wellington, and then to Governor’s Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, in 1965. Mahy worked as a nurse’s aide for six months before going to Auckland University College 1952–54 and Canterbury University College 1955, graduating BA. Though regarded at primary school as academically ‘slow’, her first publications were at the age of 7, in the children’s page of the Bay of Plenty Beacon she also entered Junior Digest competitions. With many relatives living in the same town, Mahy had a largely happy childhood, excelling at high school as a swimmer. Her father, a bridge builder, told stories and read to his children his taste for adventure was to influence Mahy’s writing. MAHY, Margaret (1936–2012), the most acclaimed of New Zealand’s children’s writers, was born and raised in Whakatane, eldest of five children. FROM THE OXFORD COMPANION TO NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

The haunting by margaret mahy