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The House at Karamu
Beryl Fletcher
Memoir
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Cover design by Deb Snibson© |
The House at Karamu Beryl Fletcher Memoir
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Fletcher is quickly establishing herself as one of the boldest and most inventive talents in contemporary New Zealand fiction’ - Jennifer Lawn It's a tough and profoundly moving recollection of 20th-century survival as an antipodean woman and artist. Not a manifesto exactly but so illuminating and true as to have the same effect. - Catherine Ford The Age ‘Beryl Fletcher demonstrates a large talent for metaphor, theme, character and descriptions which border on the lyrical…’ - Ruth Hogg, The Dominion The Autumn Summer School offers German and international students the possibility to meet new people, talk to authors such as Beryl Fletcher and have fun while doing something for their studies. There will be lectures, seminars, readings and other activities. Readings and lectures will also be open to an interested public. Many interesting researchers, theorists and writers have already been invited. About the author: Beryl Fletcher was born in New Zealand. In 1992, her novel The Word Burners was awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the best first book in South Asia and the South Pacific. She has published three other novels, The Iron Mouth, The Silicon Tongue.and The Bloodwood Clan. In 1994, she was chosen to represent New Zealand at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA. In 1999, she was appointed as Writer in Residence at The University of Waikato, New Zealand. Now sixty, Beryl believes that women who matured Before Feminism have important stories to tell. In Cyberfiction, she tells how one of these stories came to be written.
A House at Karamu is a funny and touching memoir of writer Beryl Fletcher’s life. Beginning with a childhood in wartime New Zealand, Beryl tells humorously of a brash child growing up in a close-knit communist family in Waikato. Once she had finished school Beryl reluctantly studied as a dentistry nurse, before finding her true passion for opera. After joining an opera company her life takes a new twist with marriage, an unexpected move to Australia, the birth of her children, and her growing feminist consciousness. With a superbly detailed description of life in Kings Cross and later, rural New South Wales, and her difficulties within a confining and unfaithful marriage, A House at Karamu is a beautifully written memoir telling the story of one life, and yet will be familiar to many.
Interspersing Beryl’s intimate narrative is her contemporary voice, describing her current relationship with her adored father and family, and her sadness at his eventual death. This book, and Beryl’s story of her life, will stay with you, and will be adored by readers of Dorothy Hewett and Ruth Park.
Beryl’s work has been acclaimed locally and internationally. She won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book for The Word Burners; and her three other novels have been with regular inclusions on the Top Twenty titles list for the Listener Book Festival in New Zealand. Beryl has been awarded numerous grants and frequently travels to Europe to speak about her work, her books are now published in German and Korean.
This is a lovely, fresh, bounteous book, which sprints from page to page.-Peter Wells New Zealand Books‘
BERYL FLETCHER WAS AN AUTHOR PARTICPANT IN THE AUTUMN SUMMER SCHOOL 2002
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