HR 35 Editorial

I am always reminded, as we head into the darkest part of the year, that on the other side of the world the days are lengthening. We have had our summer and now it’s their turn; they have paid their winter dues and now have months of warmth ahead of them to look forward to. One such happy place is New Zealand, a small nation with an amazing landscape and a remarkable cultural track record for its size. Geographically, New Zealand is roughly the same size as Japan, but at just over four million inhabitants, its population is closer to that of the greater Boston metropolitan region.

Few Americans know the name of even a single New Zealand writer. Well, OK, maybe Katherine Mansfield. But there are dozens more worth knowing about: Witi Ihimaera, Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame. The problem, as any antipodean will tell you, is what Geoffrey Blainey memorably termed the “tyranny of distance”—they are just so darned far away. So, when a young New Zealand writer complained to me recently about the difficulty of getting noticed over here, I took her point. With the help of Ian Conrich, director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, we have assembled a selection of work by some of the best known names in contemporary New Zealand literature for this issue of Harvard Review.

Our other news is nothing if not self-evident. After thinking and talking about it for several years, we have finally redesigned the journal. Book covers are easily changed but a completely new interior is a lot of work, and we think our designer Alex Camlin has given us one that is both elegant and easy on the eyes. The new, more open layout does mean fewer words per page, but we have tried to compensate for this by making the issue longer. 

Of course, there are a great many other things to be said about what’s here but, Whoops! I’m out of room. Perhaps in future I ought to allow two pages for the editorial…