GRAEME LAY was born in 1944 in Foxton. He grew up in two small coastal towns in Taranaki, first in Oakura, where he began school, then Opunake. Growing up on the coast instilled in him a great love of the sea.
Graeme Lay began writing short stories in the late 1970s. After several of his stories were published in magazines, he began his first novel, The Mentor, which was published in 1978. His first collection of short stories, Dear Mr Cairney, was published in 1985. Since then he has published or edited forty works of fiction and non-fiction, including novels for adults and young adults, two more collections of short stories and three books of travel writing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he also devised and edited five collections of New Zealand short short stories, three of which became bestsellers.
From the 1990s onwards, after travelling to New Caledonia and Rarotonga, Graeme Lay developed a deep interest in the islands of the South Pacific and the history and culture of the region’s indigenous peoples. Many of his books, both fiction and non-fiction, are set in the South Pacific. For example his trilogy for young adults, Leaving One Foot Island (1998), Return to One Foot Island (2001) and The Pearl of One Foot Island (2004) are set mainly on Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands, and his adult thriller, Temptation Island (2000) is set on a fictional South Pacific island, Savaiki.
Graeme Lay’s other works include the travel collection The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest (2004); an historical novel, Alice & Luigi (2006); a travel memoir, Inside the Cannibal Pot (2007); The New Zealand Book of the Beach (2007) and The New Zealand Book of the Beach 2 (2008); In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific (2008) and Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish (2009). He also compiled and edited the anthology Way Back Then, Before We Were Ten: New Zealand Writers and Childhood (2009) and Home and Away (2012), a collection of New Zealand travel writing. His Globetrotter Guide to New Zealand is now in its seventh edition.
The first novel in his bestselling trilogy based on Captain Cook’s career, The Secret Life of James Cook, was published in 2013. The second novel, James Cook’s New World, was published in 2014 and the final novel, James Cook’s Lost World, in 2015. All three are published by HarperCollins under the Fourth Estate imprint.
An updated version of Graeme Lay’s entry in
The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature is at:
www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writer/lay-graeme/.