Salient

Nigel Cox

By Amy Brown | 7 Aug, 2006

Described as one of New Zealand’s most adventurous novelists, Nigel Cox was born in Pahiatua and grew up in Masterton and the Hutt Valley. He was the 1999 Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton. In 2000 he and his family moved to Berlin, where he worked at the Jewish Museum. They returned to New Zealand in 2005. His published novels include Waiting For Einstein (1984), Dirty Work (1987), Skylark Lounge (2000) and Tarzan Presley, which received rave reviews and was made a runner-up in the Fiction category of the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Cox’s latest published novel, Responsibility, a hard-boiled page turner, set in Berlin and told from the perspective of a museum curator with a slightly dodgy past, also obtained widespread critical acclaim and was runner-up for Fiction in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In late 2005, Nigel was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but continued to write. He died on Friday 28 July 2006, three weeks after completing his last novel, The Cowboy Dog, which will be published by VUP this November.