Lloyd David Jones (born 23 March 1955) is a New Zealand author. His novel Mister Pip (2006) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Early life, education and family

Jones was born in Lower Hutt in 1955, and attended Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington. Despite fulfilling the requirements of a political science degree, Jones was unable to graduate from university at the time due to library fines owing; he eventually completed his course of study and graduated in 2007. He was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Victoria University in May 2009. Jones's older brother is property investor and former politician Sir Bob Jones. He also has three older sisters. Jones' partner is Australian writer Carrie Tiffany. He has two sons and a daughter. One of his sons, Avi Duckor-Jones, was the winner of the first season of reality television show Survivor NZ in 2017. His other son, Sam Duckor-Jones, is an artist and poet.

Literary career

After leaving university and spending time travelling overseas, Jones became a sports reporter at The Evening Post, and began writing fiction. His first novel, Gilmore's Dairy (1985), was a satirical novel about a young man growing up in a small New Zealand town, and was followed by Splinter (1988), a novel set in Lower Hutt with two primary narratives (one about an early immigrant and the other about a magazine editor). Like his later work, these two early novels blended suburban realism, black comedy and originality. In 1988, Jones was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. In 1991 he published a short fiction collection, Swimming for Australia (1991), which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. In 1994 he curated an exhibition which illustrated the concept of Saturday in New Zealand life. The work was a collaboration with photographer Bruce Foster and held at the National Library in Wellington. The work was published as The Last Saturday and included historical photographs, contemporary photographs by Foster and an essay by Jones. In May 2003, a theatrical adaptation of Jones' novel The Book of Fame was presented at Wellington's Downstage Theatre. It was adapted for the stage by Carl Nixon, New Zealand novelist and playwright. In May 2007, Jones won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. The novel is set during the Bougainville Civil War of the early 1990s in Papua New Guinea. The book was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. Jones was the 2007 recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency. Jones was inspired to investigate his family history by the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and published a memoir, A History of Silence, in 2013. In 2015 Jones spent a year in Australia as a resident writer at the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. He subsequently spent 2016–2017 in Berlin as a recipient of a DAAD scholarship.

Awards and honours

Selected works