Sir James McNeish, Wellington, KNZM
For services to literature. Mr McNeish is a national and international author. Over the last 53 years he has created a body of work spanning the fiction, non-fiction, play-writing, documentary and journalistic genres. His 1965 book, Fire Under the Ashes, about the life of a Sicilian anti-Mafia reformer in Sicily was translated into several languages. He was nominated for the Booker Prize for his 1986 book Lovelock, which explores the life of New Zealand’s world record-breaking athlete, Jack Lovelock. His most recent work is a novel, The Crime of Huey Dunstan, published in 2010. His non-fiction works cover a variety of topics from politics, to history and biography, and crime. He has been a columnist for various newspapers and the Listener magazine and worked for the BBC. In 1973 he was the recipient of the Winn-Mason Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, which enabled him to become a writer in residence in Menton, France. In 1999 Mr McNeish was the National Library of New Zealand Fellow and in 2009 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency. In 2010 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in non-fiction.