New Zealand author Patricia Grace, the twentieth laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has been writing and publishing since the mid-1970s. Grace’s published work includes six novels, five short-story collections, and several books for children. Baby No-Eyes, her fourth novel, was the representative text read by this year’s Neustadt Prize jury. Joy Harjo, who nominated Grace for the Neustadt award, notes that Grace is “an essential and key figure in the emergence of a unique Maori fiction,” describing her work as a “brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling contained within the more contemporary Western literary forms of the novel and short story.”

Grace’s previous awards include the New Zealand Fiction Award in 1987 and the Frankfurt Liberaturepreis in 1994 for her novel Potiki, which has been translated into several languages. She received the Hubert Church Prose Award for Best First Book for Waiariki in 1976. Dogside Story won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize in 2001 and was also long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her novel Tu was awarded the Deutz Medal for fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2005.

Grace was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives on the ancestral land of her father’s people in Plimmerton, a small coastal community. She and her husband, Waiariki Grace, have raised seven children. A special section of the May 2009 issue of World Literature Today was devoted to her life and work.