Stephanie Johnson

Stephanie Johnson lives in Auckland and is the author of novels including The Heart’s Wild Surf (1996), and The Shag Incident (2002), judged book of the year at the 2003 national book awards. A memoir was published by Bridget Williams Books in 2016. Stephanie was born in Auckland in 1961.

Books
Apr 15, 2019

Embracing the void: a powerhouse writer turns to self-publishing

Stephanie Johnson is an acclaimed, multi-award-winning New Zealand author, and also the co-founder of the Auckland Writers Festival. But could she get her latest novel published? Yeah, nah.

Read on.

Books
Aug 7, 2018

How to make the story of an affair between a young woman and a much older man seem original

Stephanie Johnson suspects the debut novel by English writer Lisa Halliday is "the first flaring of a great talent".

Read on.

Books
Mar 29, 2018

Book of the Week: Middle-class love and sex and agony

Stephanie Johnson luxuriates in the new Julian Barnes novel - a story of adultery which "wrestles with the deepest conflicts of human existence."

Read on.

Books
Feb 15, 2018

Book of the Week: A disturbing modern fable by Lloyd Jones

Two refugees are shut in a small cage and fed through a hole in the wires: Stephanie Johnson reviews The Cage, the claustrophobic, dystopian novel by Lloyd Jones.

Read on.

Books
Feb 20, 2017

The Monday extract: Stephanie Johnson on the problem with Australia

An extract from Playing for Both Sides, a kind of memoir by Auckland novelist Stephanie Johnson on her love-hate relationship with Australia.

Read on.

Books
Sep 13, 2016

The Mervyn Thompson Affair: ‘The women who made the attack must have believed they were doing a brave thing’

All week this week we revisit the Mervyn Thompson Affair – the strange, powerful 1984 incident when six masked women abducted an Auckland university lecturer, chained him to a tree in Western Springs, threatened to castrate him, and labelled him a rapist. Today: a memoir by Thompson's friend, novelist Stephanie Johnson.

Read on.

Books
Jan 21, 2016

Let us once more inspect the private lives of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

Stephanie Johnson reviews a biography of Ted Hughes, which takes yet another close, obsessive look at his doomed marriage to Sylvia Plath.

Read on.

The Spinoff is made possible by the generous support of the following organisations.
Please help us by supporting them.