Laurence Fearnley is a novelist and nonfiction writer. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards and was shortlisted for the international 2010 Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing. It was also named on the shortlist of the Booksellers NZ ‘Bestseller of the Decade” shortlist. Her 2014 novel, Reach, was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.  Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and a finalist in the Nielsen BookData NZ Booksellers awards. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the 2001 Montana Book Awards. Edwin and Matilda, Mother’s Day, and The Hut Builder were longlisted for the IMPAC Award. In 2019 she was made a  New Zealand Arts Foundation Arts Laureate. In 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition for her essay ‘The Perfume Counter’. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial  Award and the NZSA/Auckland Museum National Research Grant. In 2018 Laurence worked with author Paul Hersey to edit an anthology of NZ mountain writing To the Mountains. Research for this book was undertaken as a result of winning the 2016 Friends of the Hocken Collections Research Grant and the anthology went on to win the NZ Mountain Book Awards (nonfiction). In 2015 she worked alongside mountaineer Lydia Bradey on Bradey’s autobiography Going Up is Easy which was a finalist in the 2015 Banff Mountain Book Awards. This book received research funding from the CLNZ/NZSA Research Grant. In 2004 Laurence was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2023 she was awarded the Beatson Fellowship. Laurence Fearnley lives in Dunedin.              

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