Alan Duff’s emergence on the New Zealand literary landscape in 1990 has been likened to the bursting of a volcano. His first novel, Once Were Warriors, immediately established him as one of New Zealand’s most controversial writers both on account of his head-on attack on cultural sensitivities and the sheer muscle of his language. Arriving on the back of a Maori Renaissance, Duff vehemently berated his people for failing to adapt to the standards of modernity 150 years of colonisation had established in New Zealand. Duff is a writer with a mission and each of his (to date) seven books of fiction reiterates a firmly held position and challenges opposition, while his writing at the same time relentlessly flaunts the …
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