Rowan Metcalfe, known as Rowan Pahutini, was a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, poet, editor and journalist.
12 Facts About Rowan Metcalfe
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Rowan Metcalfe won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for a short story in 1997, having won the Young Writers award in 1974, and her first and only novel Transit of Venus was published posthumously in 2004.
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Rowan Metcalfe grew up on a sheep farm near Gisborne and began writing as a young child.
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Rowan Metcalfe was encouraged in her endeavours by her school English teacher, Betty Gilderdale.
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Rowan Metcalfe moved to England in 1975 and spent nearly twenty years working as an editor of a political magazine and raising her children.
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Rowan Metcalfe had previously come third in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition with "Perfume" and third in the Quote Unquote short story competition.
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Reviewer Margaret Agnew noted that the main character's blindness "allows Metcalfe to create a strange and exotic world out of the everyday mundane".
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In 1997, Rowan Metcalfe began writing a biography of her Polynesian ancestor, Mauatua, who left Tahiti in 1791 aboard the Bounty.
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Rowan Metcalfe described it as being a blend of fact and fiction.
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Rowan Metcalfe dedicated the book to her father and siblings, and described it as a "mediation on my ancestors".
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Reviewer Susan Jacobs for The New Zealand Herald observed that it was sad that Rowan Metcalfe did not live to see the book published, and described the novel as "vibrant, passionate yet ultimately unwieldy".
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Joan Rosier-Jones for the New Zealand Review of Books called the book as a "well-paced and a compelling read", praised Metcalfe's meticulous research, and concluded that "Rowan Metcalfe's death while still in her 40s is a tremendous loss to New Zealand literature".