Book description
"I love doubters: of a truly honest doubter I have great
hope." Printer, botanist and missionary, William Colenso was a
nineteenth-century maverick, a true original. He protested at the
signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, arguing that Maori did not fully
understand its implications. He became a troubled conscience during the
white-hot period of colonisation, maintaining his dissident voice
throughout his career. Peter Wells refreshes our vision of this awkward,
highly talented man, who lost his family after the church expelled him
for fathering a child by a Maori woman. Rejected by church, family and
friends, Colenso made botany his home and lovingly described the plants
of New Zealand. At the same time he wrote a series of remarkable
pamphlets that open up our past. 'I write for future generations,' he
noted in 1881. The time has come to welcome Colenso back. 'Peter Wells
is a writer and film-maker. He studied history at Auckland University
and the University of Warwick, England. As a writer, he has won the NZ
Book Award for Fiction for his first book of short stories, Dangerous
Desires which was published by Viking Penguin in New York and Secker and
Warburg in London. The book also won, among other awards, the PEN (NZ)
Best First Book in Prose Award in 1992. He has since published another
book of short fiction, The Duration of a Kiss, ( New York, Sydney and
London) and a novel, Boy Overboard which was shortlisted for the 1998
Commonwealth Prize (Pacific-Asia Region). His memoir Long Loop Home won
the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography. Iridescence was
the runner up for the Deutz Medal Winner for Fiction at the Montana Book
of the Year Awards and a finalist in the Tasmania-Pacific Award. Lucky
Bastard, a novel, was published in 2006. In 2009 Peter Wells won the CLL
Award to write a book on William Colenso. In 2011 Peter Wells was
awarded the Michael King Fellowship which is one of the NZ's largest
writing fellowships and supports established writers to work on a major
project over two or more years.'
