I moved to New Zealand from Winnipeg when I was almost five. I hated it. It was to a city in the south of New Zealand called Invercargill and there was constant rain. There was a depressing sensation in the air.
My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.
People were nicer to me when I was in the arts. I experienced extreme racism in small-town New Zealand. Racism which really went away when I got into the arts.
I'd come back after having served as ambassador to New Zealand and found that I had real concerns about the direction in which this country was headed.
Actually, parts of New Zealand remind me of Suffolk. There's not many flat bits, but just the atmosphere there. There's a kind of a core tranquility about it, a kind of assuredness that this is fairly close to approaching the perfect way to be.
In 'The Hobbit,' there were British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand actors, and Peter Jackson was adamant that we would all sound like we were from Britain somewhere.
