Cirrus@Austlit

Bruce Stewart, fiction writer and dramatist, of Ngata Raukawa, Te Arawa, grew up in the Wairarapa and was educated at Wairarapa College in Auckland. He has been a bushman, builder, farm worker, prison imnmate, singer, actor and radio announcer in New Zealand before moving to Australia.

He wrote for Australian television from its earliest days (for his 1960 script, Shadow of a Pale Horse, newspaper reviews called him a 'Sydney actor-writer').

In 1956 he settled in England. Stewart began serious writing in 1974 and his prison story, 'Broken Arse', had a great impact at the PEN/Victoria University Conference in 1979. He later rewrote it as a playscript which was performed in Wellington in 1990 and televised and published in 1991. Some of his novels reflect his Australian experiences.

Stewart has lived mainly in Wellington, setting up the first work trust and founding Tapu Te Ranga Marae at Island Bay, a centre for debate and education in Maori culture and the redevelopment of native bush. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (514) comments that Stewart 'expressed the anger, confused loyalties and spiritual aspiration of late-twentieth century Maori.'

(Source: Adapted from 'Stewart, Bruce (1936- )', The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature ed. Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998): 514-515)