Elizabeth Knox

Elizabeth Fiona Knox CNZM (born 15 February 1959) is a New Zealand writer. She has authored several novels for both adults and teenagers, autobiographical novellas, and a collection of essays. One of her best-known works is The Vintner's Luck (1998), which won several awards, has been published in ten languages and was made into a film of the same name by Niki Caro in 2009.

 Knox is also known for her young adult literary fantasy series, Dreamhunter Duet. Her most recent novels are Mortal Fire and Wake, both published in 2013, and The Absolute Book, published in 2019. Knox was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Atheist parents raised her and her two sisters in a household where religion was often debated. They spent their childhood living in various small suburbs of Wellington, including Pomare, Wadestown, Waikanae, and Paremata. 

She went to high school at Tawa College and later published a trilogy of novellas that were influenced by her childhood experiences of living in and around Wellington. Knox enjoyed inventing stories as a child and was an avid reader, but she had difficulties with writing because she was slightly dyslexic. When she was eleven, she created an oral narrative history with her younger sister Sara and its characters and plot evolved based on their input along with the input of their older sister, Mary, and their friend, Carol. 

It became an elaborate imaginary world with many characters, intricate plot lines, and involvements. When she was sixteen, Knox's father overheard a discussion between her, her sisters, and Carol regarding the consequences of a secret treaty set in their imaginary world and remarked that he hoped they were writing this down. Following this, they all tried "writing stories about, letters between, and poems by their characters," and Knox enjoyed it so much that she decided she would like to be a writer.

In 1983, when Knox was 24, she started a degree in English Literature at Victoria University of Wellington. A year later, she started work on After Z-Hour in Bill Manhire's Original Composition course at Victoria. The novel is about the ghost of a World War I soldier, and it was inspired by a childhood memory; at age eleven, Knox fell from a walnut tree on Anzac Day, and while in the hospital, she overheard a conversation between an older man and her father about Passchendaele and life on the Salient in 1917.

Bill Manhire encouraged her to write her novel and told her he would be more interested in seeing her complete it than her degree. After Z-Hour was published in 1987 by Victoria University Press, and Knox graduated from Victoria University of Wellington the same year. She was also awarded the ICI Young Writers Bursary award that year. In 1988 Knox, Fergus Barrowman, Nigel Cox, and Damien Wilkins, with the help of Bill Manhire, Alan Preston, and Andrew Mason, co-founded the literary journal Sport. Knox was one of its editors and has been a frequent contributor to the magazine.

Her second and third novels, Treasure (1992) and Glamour and the Sea (1996), were both set in Wellington; the former was about a religious community, while the latter was a mystery novel set in the 1940s. Alongside these novels, Knox also wrote a trilogy of novellas based on her own experiences growing up in Wellington: Paremata (1989), Pomare (1994), and Tawa (1998), later published in the compilation The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (2000). She was the recipient of the Victoria University of Wellington Writing Fellowship in 1997.