IN A WRITING career spanning more than four decades Maurice Shadbolt made a major and lasting contribution to New Zealand literature, to New Zealanders’ understanding of themselves, to others’ understanding of New Zealand and its people, and to New Zealand’s literary and artistic community.

A documentary film director in the 1950s, also an award-winning short story writer, Shadbolt completed his first book of stories, The New Zealanders, while living in London in 1959. Publication in London was soon followed by American, German and Italian editions. Critical acclaim was immediate: The Times Literary Supplement described him as “a figure to be spoken of in the same breath as Patrick White of Australia”.

Eleven novels, a volume of novellas, three more collections of stories, a play, two volumes of autobiography and a number of works of non-fiction followed. Every work of fiction has been published in New Zealand and the UK, most have also been published in the US and many have been translated, especially into Italian and German. His triptych of revisionist-historical novels — Season of the Jew (1986), Monday’s Warriors (1990), House of Strife (1993) — form perhaps the most important work of historical fiction by a New Zealand writer. All have received considerable popular and critical acclaim, with The New York Times describing Season of the Jew as one of the top books for 1987. Shadbolt’s drama (Once on Chunuk Bair) and non-fiction (especially Voices of Gallipoli) continued his focus on New Zealand’s post-colonial identity.

Maurice Francis Richard Shadbolt was born in Auckland on June 4, 1932, and educated at Avondale College and Auckland University College. He started work as a journalist before becoming a scriptwriter and documentary film-maker with the National Film Unit. He went to Europe in 1957, and it was in Britain, two years later, that his first collection of stories was published.

He continued to mine the seam of contemporary New Zealand for some 20 years with another collection of short stories and four novels, of which Strangers and Journeys (1972) was widely greeted as “the great New Zealand novel”. By the late 1970s he was began to turn his attention to history and the country’s past, starting with The Lovelock Version (1980).

Shadbolt won numerous fellowships and almost every big New Zealand literary prize, some more than once: he is the only New Zealander to win the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award three times, in 1963, 1967 and 1995. He also won the New Zealand Book Award in 1981 and a Montana New Zealand Fiction Honour Award in 1996. In 1989 he was appointed CBE for his services to New Zealand literature; in 1990 he received the Commemoration Medal for services to New Zealand; and in 1997 he was appointed an honorary doctor of literature at the University of Auckland. In the same year, which also saw the publication of his last novel, Dove on the Waters, he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

In his prime he was a key figure and advocate for the recognition and promotion of New Zealand literature, and he lobbied for better terms and conditions for writers. In addition to serving on the executive and as president of PEN, he was active in his support of other writers; where he was convinced of the merit of someone’s work he would offer concrete advice and assistance.

He was clever, vibrant, opinionated and larger than life. He always had a delicious sense of irony, a great kitbag of stories — many mocking himself — and literary gossip, although his closest friends were as likely to be painters and potters as they were fellow writers.

Shadbolt was married four times: to Gillian Heming, Barbara Magner, Bridget Armstrong, and Elspeth Sandys. He had five children.

Maurice Shadbolt, CBE, writer, was born on June 4, 1932, and died on October 10, 2004, aged 72.