When author Emily Perkins decided her next novel would be set in the New Zealand capital, her editors in the UK were pleased. The 53-year-old says this specific detail “seemed to spark interest rather than resistance”. The book, Lioness, tells the story of a self-styled, luxury guru who faces midlife reckoning amid whispers of fraud, and a new friendship with her charismatic neighbour.

“There was absolute openness about something that was set in Wellington,” she says.

Perkins’ experience marks a growing interest in New Zealand fiction from readers around the word. It comes 10 years after one the country’s most acclaimed writers, Eleanor Catton, became the youngest winner of the Booker prize for her novel The Luminaries.

Academics and publishers say New Zealand writers are booming overseas, yet some authors hold concerns for the future of the industry and funding for the creative sector after the centre-right coalition government took power in October 2023.

Last year saw a string of globally successful releases from emerging and established New Zealand authors, including Catherine Chidgey, Anna Smaill and Perkins. #BookTok star Chloe Gong shot to the New York Times bestseller list with her new fantasy novella. Catton’s latest book, Birnam Wood, secured spots on bestseller lists in the US and the UK. The novel was shortlisted for several UK awards. Chidgey and Catton have also been nominated for the 2024 Dublin literary prize.

Breaking into new markets

Tina Makereti, author and senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington says there is a “boom of New Zealand writers being published overseas”, including the US, UK and Europe.

“It’s really hard to break into those markets, and I think that’s changed,” Makereti says, citing the recent success of writers such as Tayi Tibble – who last year became the first Māori poet published in The New Yorker – and Perkins.

The sentiment is echoed by Noel Murphy, commercial director at Granta Publications, which publishes Catton. He says New Zealand authors are making inroads in countries around the world.

“All of a sudden, there are a bunch of New Zealand writers on their way into the European market in a way that probably hasn’t been the case before,” Murphy says.

Makereti says international publishers are choosing writing that is “very New Zealand”. She says after Covid, borders have become less limiting, and the star power of former prime minister Jacinda Ardern has also helped.

“New Zealand is readily identifiable because of Jacinda,” she says.

‘Living on the fringes’

While the success is growing, writers are split on the appeal of the work coming out of New Zealand – or whether there’s a commonality at all.

Murphy says over the last few years, reader appetite has shifted “away from middle-class people worrying about getting divorced” and towards “dark, slightly unusual stories on the edge, which border on horror”.

Chidgey says New Zealand authors “seem to write from the point of view of the outsider, from someone living on the fringes”.

“And I think that’s maybe geographical – we do live on the fringes of the world.”

Wellington-based Smaill released her third novel Bird Life last year. The author, who was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2015, says there’s “a kind of a privilege to the isolation”.

“When there are fewer people, it forces a kind of independence of mind where you don’t inherit easy answers to things,” Smaill says.

“I do think the ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ is a thing. There’s a self-reliance that is a creative mode to fall back on,” she says.

Perkins stresses that just as there is no all-encapsulating style of New Zealand fiction, nor is there one clear reason for its recent popularity.

“The more there is, the more variety you see – and the more pointless it becomes to try to define it in any one way,” says the writer, who was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction.

“It could be a big thing like Jacinda or it could be a more conceptual thing like the colonial reckoning, or it could be down to a few people.”

Funding fears

Despite the recent success, some hold concern over future support for creative industries in New Zealand, with arts groups saying the sector is starved of adequate funding.

There is little to suggest the new National-led government will prioritise support for the sector. The National party did not have an arts policy in the lead-up to the 2023 election, nor were arts and culture mentioned in its coalition deals with minor parties Act and New Zealand First.

Speaking to broadcaster RNZ in December, the new minister for arts, culture and heritage, Paul Goldsmith, said funding for the creative sector would be squeezed in 2024.

“I’m taking stock of where we’re at, we’re obviously arriving at a time when there’s not large amounts of money sloshing around, or free money, or extra money to come – so it’s going to be tight.”

Creative New Zealand – the national arts development agency that funds artist projects – receives a baseline sum of just over NZ$16m a year from the government, which has barely shifted since 2006. The agency gets another 70% of its funding via the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board, which is now under threat due to proposed changes in the way the board allocates money. Creative NZ has warned it is operating at $5m less, going into 2024, than the previous year.

Despite international praise and sales of New Zealand authors, the funding that helped give rise rise to its current vanguard has been eroded. Smaill says the government led by Helen Clark, in the early 2000s, was supportive of writers.

“For me, and for many other writers I know, a far more significant and measurable impact was the support provided by the Clark government,” Smaill says.

The author says a funding scheme for creatives, dubbed the artists’ dole, was a “huge enabler of my writing career”.

“It gave me the freedom to focus on writing for a year following my master’s and was pivotal in getting my first book published. That kind of funding is such a shot in the arm for new writers, and I’d love to see a return to it.”