Rudy Castaneda Lopez

In 1986 Mexican-American artist, Rudy, and his Kiwi wife, Janice, walked 5000 km across the USA in support of global nuclear disarmament. Afterward, with a pregnant wife and $250, he immigrant to New Zealand and worked in art education for the next two decades. He wrote his first novel, The Song of Laughing Bird (National Pacific Press) for daughter, India in 2005. His project for his Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia in 2013 was the first draft of Open Your Eyes, Jackson Ryder (Escalator Press 2015). He was also given the Honour Award in the New Zealand Writing School Short Story Competition that year. In 2014 he started writing full-time. He was longlisted for the 2020 Michael Gifkins Prize for his unpuplished manuscript of Tattersoull 1918. He lives on the banks of the Pauatahanui Inlet, with Jan, his two sons  and two cats.

Genre:

  • Adult Fiction

Skills:

  • Novelist

Branch:

Wellington

Location:

Porirua

Publications:

The Song of Laughing Bird

Published 2005 by National Pacific Press

Copies available through the author.

Open your eyes, Jackson Ryder

Published 2015 by Escalator Press

Tattersoull18

The year is 1918. The Great War is almost over, but the world now faces something even deadlier – a devastating influenza epidemic that the authorities seem determined to cover up.

Corporal Adam Tattersoull has left the battlefields of France and returned home to New Zealand. He is tormented by memories of the war and, even more so, by a transgression he has kept hidden for years.

Nurse Eliza McPherson is fleeing her home in Dunedin to start a new life in Northland – as far away as possible from the shameful secret she is trying to outrun.

Dr Hermann Mann has spent the war incarcerated on a prison island in the Wellington Harbour, his only crime being his country of birth. Now he is determined to escape at any cost.

When fate brings these three desperate people together, they find themselves united against a terrifying foe. Tattersoull 18 is a story of guilt, innocence, love and redemption, set in a place that is sometimes dramatically different, sometimes eerily similar to twenty-first century New Zealand.