23 Facts About Maurice Gee

Maurice Gough Gee was born on 22 August 1931 and is a New Zealand novelist.

Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand's most distinguished and prolific authors, having written over thirty novels for adults and children, and has won numerous awards both in New Zealand and overseas, including multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement.

Maurice Gee is well-known for children's and young adult fiction such as Under the Mountain.

Maurice Gee has won multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and in 2002 he was presented with the prestigious Margaret Mahy Award by the Children's Literature Foundation in recognition of his contributions to children's literature.

Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane, and brought up in Henderson, a suburb of Auckland, a location that frequently features in his writing.

Maurice Gee's mother, Harriet Lyndahl Gee, was a socialist and an aspiring writer who had some of her work published, including a children's picture book called Mihi and the Last of the Moas, and his father, Leonard Gee, was a carpenter.

Maurice Gee was the middle child of their three sons.

Maurice Gee was the grandson of controversial Presbyterian-turned-Unitarian minister James Chapple, later to be the inspiration for Maurice Gee's character George Plumb in his Plumb trilogy.

Maurice Gee attended Henderson Primary School and Avondale College, and completed BA and MA degrees at the University of Auckland, which subsequently recognised him with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 1998, and an honorary Doctorate of Literature in 2004.

Maurice Gee received an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University of Wellington in 1987.

Maurice Gee began writing at university, and had short stories published in New Zealand journals Landfall and Mate.

Maurice Gee's first published novel was The Big Season, a novel about a rugby player who becomes interested in a burglar and the burglar's girlfriend.

Maurice Gee himself was a keen rugby player and the games in the novel were inspired by his own experiences.

In 1964, Maurice Gee was the sixth recipient of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, one of New Zealand's most prestigious literary awards.

Maurice Gee followed this novel with a collection of short stories, A Glorious Morning, Comrade, which won the prize for fiction at the 1976 New Zealand Book Awards, and a further novel Games of Choice.

Maurice Gee has described it as his "grandfather novel", with the character George Plumb closely based on his mother's father James Chapple, particularly his early life and his trials for heresy and seditious utterance.

Maurice Gee was the 1992 recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, a literary fellowship that enables the recipient to work in Menton, France, for part of the year, where Katherine Mansfield herself lived and worked in the early 20th century.

Maurice Gee received two prestigious awards: in 2003 he was named as one of New Zealand's greatest living artists by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand through the presentation of an Icon Award, and in 2004 he received a 60,000 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement for fiction.

Maurice Gee said it is "almost certainly" going to be his last book.

Maurice Gee's novels are commonly set in New Zealand, often in fictitious versions of Henderson, where he grew up.

Maurice Gee had a seven-year relationship with Hera Smith, with whom he had a son, Nigel, in September 1959.

Maurice Gee married his wife Margareta in 1970, having met in 1966 at the Alexander Turnbull Library where she worked.

Maurice Gee is an Honorary Associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.