Alan Duff's first novel, published when he was forty years old, immediately established the writer as a literary voice not heard before in New Zealand. Drawing on a youth and early adulthood of failed expectations and broken promises and channelling it through a narrative idiom shaped by American literary influences, Duff's novel broke the mould of the Maori novel as it had taken shape in the previous two decades and ushered in a broadening of the spectrum of Maori fiction in the 1990s. No writer before Duff had focused as resolutely or seriously on suburban Maori welfare dependence as a shared experience, and Duff's language successfully articulated it as an ideology or class consciousness that his writing sought to challenge and transform.
While giving an impression of unmediated
1884 words
Citation: Heim, Otto. "Once Were Warriors". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23260, accessed 08 May 2024.]
