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Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins was born in New Zealand in 1970. She trained at the New Zealand Drama School and worked in theatre and television until 1993 when she studied creative writing at Victoria University, Wellington. She moved to London in 1994, worked for Bloomsbury Publishing, and wrote a long-running column for the Independent on Sunday. She is the author of Not Her Real Name, a collection of short stories that won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Montana New Zealand First Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the novels Leave Before You Go, The New GirlNovel About my Wife, which won The Believer Book Award and the Montana NZ Book Award for Fiction, The Forrests and Lioness. She wrote the screenplay for Eleanor Catton's novel The Rehearsal, an updated version of Ibsen's A Doll's House and, in 2022, her first play, The Made, was staged by Auckland Theatre Company to great acclaim. She was given an Arts Foundation Laureate at New Zealand’s inaugural National Arts Awards in 2011 and was awarded member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for Services to Literature.

She lives in Wellington and is Senior Lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington.

Website: emilyperkinsauthor.com

Books in order of publication:

Not Her Real Name and Other Stories (1996)

Leave Before You Go (1998)

The New Girl (2001)

Novel About My Wife (2008)

The Forrests (2012)

Lioness (2023)