Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins is a multi-award winning writer of contemporary fiction. She won immediate fame with her first collection of stories, "not her real name and other stories" (1996). The book established her as an important writer of her generation, and won the Best First Book Award for Fiction at the 1996 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the 1997 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in Britain.

Subsequent novels include "Leave Before You Go" (1998), "The New Girl" (2001), and "Novel About My Wife" (2008). "The New Girl" was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and "Novel About My Wife" won the overall Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry in the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the 2008 Believer Book Awards in the USA. Her next novel, "The Forrests", will be published in 2012.

Perkins was awarded a 2011 Arts Foundation Laureate Award, and has presented "The Book Show" for TV One and "The Good Word" on TVNZ 7, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland.