New Zealand Week: Day 2: Author Profiles: Alan Duff

Alan Duff.

Alan Duff, born 26 October, 1950, is one of New Zealand's leading authors.  He is best known for his novel, Once Were Warriors, the first book in a trilogy dealing with the troubles of a Māori (New Zealand aboriginal) family in modern New Zealand.


Duff's father, Gowan Duff, was of European descent while his mother, Kuia Hinau, was Māori.  When Alan was 10 they separated and he was sent to live with his mother's relatives.  He was raised mostly in state-sponsored housing and has described the maternal relatives who primarily raised him as violent, ignorant, slothful, and usually drunk.  He was eventually sent to live with a paternal uncle, but this suited him no better.  A frequent runaway, he spent time in reform schools and in borstal youth prisons.  In his early adulthood he worked at several jobs, including installing sheet metal, before moving for a time to London, England.

After returning to his native New Zealand, Duff ran a number of small businesses before turning to writing full time around 1985.  His first novel was rejected, but his second, Once Were Warriors, was published in 1990 to massive critical and public acclaim.  Several other books, equally well received but never quite as popular, would follow.  Once Were Warriors was turned into a film in 1994; the film was a hit not only in New Zealand, but internationally as well.

Once Were Warriors
early edition cover.

Duff was also writing columns for various newspapers and became a controversial figure for his opinions on the state of Māori affairs.  It is Duff's opinion that his mother's people should move forward and find a new way in society rather than dwelling on the past.  This view has made him by turns an unpopular and a celebrated figure in the eyes of much of New Zealand's population.

Part of his dream to help Māori people was further realized in 1995 when he co-founded the Books in Homes program.  The goal is to offer inexpensive books to impoverished families, as well as helping to stock the libraries of schools around the country.  Among the program's many features: low-income new mothers are sent home from hospital with a bag of books as well as their baby, and members of popular New Zealand sports teams (such as the All-Blacks football squad) travel to schools and community centers encouraging literacy among children.  So great is the success of Books in Homes that several other countries, including the U.S., have adopted similar programs.

In 1996, Duff published What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, a follow up to Once Were Warriors.  This second story of the Heke family garnered similar acclaim, and was filmed in 1999, with Duff writing the screenplay.

Duff in the early 2000s.

Duff published a memoir, Out of the Mist and the Steam, in 1998.  It chronicled in vivid detail his childhood in the slums and youth prisons of New Zealand and revealed just how many of the details in his popular novels were autobiographical.

In 2001 Duff's fiction ventured to settings outside of New Zealand for Szabad, a novel based on tales of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.  2002 saw the author returning one more time to the tale of the Heke family for the book Jake's Long Shadow.  The first book in that series continued to exert its force over the popular consciousness of New Zealand when, in 2003, a musical adaptation of Once Were Warriors was staged in various parts of the country.

Duff has long been a controversial figure, and trouble seems, in some ways, to dog his steps.  The years 2007 and 2008 saw him face various charges of everything from speeding to resisting arrest.  However, those troubles are, for the moment, behind him.  Duff's latest novel, Who Sings for Lu?, was published in 2009, and this powerhouse author shows no signs that he will stop any time soon.