Stranded in the south: Author Laurence Fearnley on novels, cancer and southern isolation

Saturday, 3 May 2025

It is a murky afternoon in Dunedin when The Press calls. Does the weather matter? Not usually, but it does if you are talking to writer Laurence Fearnley.

Senses also matter. The Press responds that it is a clear blue day in Christchurch interrupted by two fires, including an industrial one in Bromley.

That reminds her. When Fearnley was a kid growing up in Christchurch, she lived in Bromley when there was still an open dump. That old dump smell. Once inhaled, never forgotten.

“One of my earliest memories is just the smell, but also going to the dump when you could scavenge,” she says. “It would have been about 1966.”

Both of these things, weather and senses, will be important later in the story.

After Bromley, Fearnley’s family moved to Shirley, where she went to Banks Ave School and Avonside Girls’ High. At the University of Canterbury, she did degrees in American studies and art history. That was in the 1980s and she remembers one of her American studies lecturers, Bob Stowell, was arrested during an anti-nuclear ships protest at Lyttelton.

After graduating, she worked as a curator in galleries and museums, including the Robert McDougall Art Annex in Christchurch, the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt and the Te Papa Project Office in Wellington.

Then one day, writing fiction replaced curating.

“They’re closely related,” she says. “It was seeing these artists do something they’re really passionate about and thinking I really wanted to be that person, rather than the person writing about that person.”

By the time she was at Te Papa, where her desk was in an open plan office and the work became more bureaucratic, she was miserable and so “I thought I’d give writing a go”.

She did her MA in creative writing at Victoria University. She remembers Catherine Chidgey and Kapka Kassabova being the big stars of that intake.

After she met her husband, Alex, an immunologist, she went to Germany with him while he did his post-doc. Later, she got her PhD in creative writing. They have one son.

Her fiction career began in 1998 with The Sound of Her Body. Nearly all of her 13 novels have been set in the South Island or even further south. Degrees of Separation was set in Antarctica, following an Artists to the Antarctic Fellowship.

As well as fiction, she co-wrote the memoir of South Island mountaineer Lydia Bradey, the first woman to climb Mt Everest without supplementary oxygen.

Fearnley defines herself as “a regional, South Island writer” and agrees that part of New Zealand’s current malaise is a sense of the south’s separateness, a feeling of being left behind.

“There’s a definite sense down here that we’re getting more and more cut off from the rest of the country,” she says. “Living off the scraps but at the same time being required to provide the resources. It’s a funny feeling. It seems to be pretty down at the moment.

“There is a feeling that we’re being ignored and really important projects aren’t going ahead.”

Take the protest march over Dunedin Hospital cuts last year, which she went on. A crowd of 35,000 people showed up.

Some South Island writers also seem overlooked at a national level. Fearnley is a big fan of Christchurch writer Carl Nixon. She called his last book, The Waters, one everyone should read and she agrees it did not win the recognition it deserved.

“We kind of live in a parallel world. Festivals say it’s too expensive to get South Islanders up to Auckland, and I can imagine they’re also thinking South Islanders don’t get the audiences some North Island writers would get. But at the same time, if you never get invited to these things, you’ll never get the profile if you’re not the kind of writer who puts themselves out there with websites and constant Twitter (X).”

But isolation in the far south has its advantages.

“It gives you a sort of independence and sense of privacy,” she says. “You can just get on and focus on writing, rather than the business that surrounds writing. There is a freedom to it as well as a drawback.”

Stuck at the glacier

Speaking of the business that surrounds writing, Fearnley is a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She will find out on May 14 if her 2024 novel, At the Grand Glacier Hotel, has won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, which comes with an attention-getting cash prize of $65,000.

She is up against Delirious by Damien Wilkins, Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn and The Mires by Tina Makereti. That is a heavyweight selection. Wilkins, Gunn and Fearnley are all previous winners, and Makereti has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Short Story Prize for the Pacific.

Fearnley has been shortlisted before too. No predictions or even hopes are permitted.

“I’ve judged awards and I know it’s a tricky process. You can’t really get into the heads of the people who are selecting a winner.”

As for the novel, the Ockham blurb sums it up beautifully.

It says: “While recovering from a leg sarcoma, Libby is temporarily stranded in the Grand Glacier Hotel. At the base of the swiftly retreating Fox Glacier, she gradually rediscovers her self-confidence and mobility. This novel introduces an ordinary but spectacular world in which it’s possible to imagine that the extinct South Island kōkako yet lives. The sense of place, the fascinating cast of characters, and the investigation of human relationships linger long after the book is closed.”

As this is Westland, weather matters. The hotel is stranded by a storm. Rain comes down violently, while Libby is in pain and thinking about death.

Fearnley is open about the ways in which Libby is based on her. Putting herself in her own fiction is not unusual, but it is more specific here “because I had cancer and as a result of that, had major surgery that left me having to regain strength in my leg, and getting back into walking after being a pretty active person. It is based on me and my experiences.”

The reason that might seem surprising is a frequent claim that Fearnley is shy, private or reclusive. She laughs and suspects that is simply because she does not do social media.

“I like writing. It gives me a sense of purpose and I’m really happy just writing books, but I don’t see myself as being a hermit.”

One of the reviews talked about the character of Libby occupying a liminal space between being sick and being well. There is a way in which the whole book seems to be in a liminal space, cut off from the outside world and removed from ordinary time.

“The thing that really strikes you when you’ve had cancer is the point when you’ve had your treatment and you go back home as a completely different person, either physically or mentally or both. In my case, probably more physically than mentally. You feel like you have swum out from shore and you’ve got to kind of make your own way back.

“When I was writing that book I was thinking about Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, which starts from the point of having a burden of sin. He goes on a pilgrimage and is helped by strangers, and he falls into the Slough of Despond and the River of Death, and all these things. I very much had that in my mind, but the burden in my book is a physical burden. Through random encounters with strangers, there is a feeling that if you keep moving, you’re going to end up in this better place.”

Even the landscape lends itself to a kind of symbolic reading.

“If you ever look at a topographic map at places around Franz Josef, there are wonderful place names, like a mountain called the Great Unknown or ice plateaus called the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Allah. It all gelled with this West Coast version of the Pilgrim’s Progress.”

While she does not necessarily agree with a reviewer who said the book lacked a plot, she agrees it is “an immersive book that relies on atmosphere and noticing sounds and silences”.

The ultimate slow-moving, hotel-set recovery novel is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which many have attempted but not all have finished. But Fearnley finished it.

“I found it a slog. I like slow novels but that was even a slog for me. I really like novels that are almost stationary, that go downwards rather than along. I don’t really read for plot. I read for character. I really like the tone of novels and the cadence.”

What comes next

Readers who have been keeping up with Fearnley’s work know that At the Grand Glacier Hotel was the third book in a five-book project about the five senses. Scented covered smell and Winter Time was about touch.

The third one concerned sound. There are bird noises of course, and a musical interlude, but the theme also explains the otherwise bizarre appearance of a bunch of Esperanto enthusiasts, who read Katherine Mansfield stories in their made-up language and even screen an old William Shatner horror movie called Incubus, which was filmed in Esperanto just before Shatner made it big on Star Trek.

“It was such a weird movie,” she laughs.

But she is fascinated by the peculiar interests people have.

“My husband really loves doing up Primuses and Tilley lamps. What a strange thing and yet he loves it.”

The fourth novel in the series is already finished. Titled Dedication, and concerned with the sense of sight, it will juxtapose the story of Canterbury artist Margaret Stoddart with a fictional artist working on a suffrage centenary project in Christchurch in 1993. But some real artists of the era will make appearances too, such as Neil Frazer, Linda James, Julia Morison and Margaret Dawson.

There is another personal link, through the Stoddart Cottage in Diamond Harbour, where Fearnley’s grandparents were tenants in the 1960s and “I used to stay there all the time”.

She expects the book will be out in 2026. And there are other projects.

She was recently the resident artist at Henderson House in Alexandra, Central Otago, and she has been thinking about writing a book of essays on the residencies she has had over the years, and their influence on her.

“But a friend pointed out it could be another book about white privilege, so I’m sort of mulling it over.”

Either way, her closeness to the Clutha during the residency will feed into the fifth and last novel in her senses series, which will involve kayaking on rivers. She says she used to do a lot of whitewater kayaking in the South Island, and she adds that trout will feature.

If you have not yet figured it out, the final sense is taste.

AT THE GRAND GLACIER HOTEL, by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, $37).