WRITING
I have versatile writing skills, with experience in writing for the web (NZ Parliament), technical writing (the Waitangi Tribunal and UK Ministry of Health), newspapers, and reviews. I also write fiction, with two books published by Te Herenga Waka University Press.
I Got His Blood On Me
I Got His Blood On Me (2012) won the NZSA Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction at the NZ Post Book Awards. My short fiction has also appeared in Sport, Landfall, Overland, and on Radio New Zealand.
Cover design: Michael Lewis. Cover Illustration: Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall.
“There's a Cormac McCarthy-esque concision to the language, and Patchett's heroes share a similar outback fortitude and silence, and a respect for the momentousness of the landscape.”
Monsters in the Garden
Edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen, featuring my short story, ‘The Tenth Meet’.
Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy
A Game of Two Halves
Edited by Fergus Barrowman, featuring my long-short story, ‘The Road to Tokomairiro’, which won the Long and the Short of It prize (long section) in 2011.
The Burning River
My novel published in 2019. Cover design: Turi Park.
'The Burning River suggests we are inseparable from each other, even when we don’t know it.' — Ben Brown, Landfall Review Online
Catherine Woulfe review: Welcome to the jungle: The Burning River | The Spinoff
A look back at the writing of The Burning River, and what I learnt from it: Q & A with Philip Steer
Contract writing and criticism
As part of a team at Parliament’s Hansard office, I contributed to web articles about our work in the debating chamber and beyond, including What it's Like to be a Hansard Editor and Hansard in Cartoons.
I also write reviews of contemporary literature, including for literary journal Landfall Online. Recent examples include When the Sun is Being a Bastard, and Short, Sharp Shocks.
Here you can access my feature for the Academy of New Zealand Literature on the Growth of Creative Nonfiction.