Virginia left home at age three in search of adventure in suburban Christchurch but was caught and returned within a couple of hours. The next time she left home, fifteen years later, was in leathers on a Honda 350, on a solo tour of the North Island. Before then her adventures were mostly of the imaginary kind: devouring a treasure chest of books and writing her own stories, plays and poems. As a child she also loved to dance and sing and perform funny skits. Sadly, she grew a head too tall to be a ballerina, mislaid her singing voice and went off the idea of doing sketch comedy.

That left writing, which in one form or another she has been doing ever since. Except in her first job out of university, unless you include writing computer code. With creative jobs scarce, she was provoked into applying for a job advertised for “an ambitious young man in search of a challenge”. The employer turned out to be IBM, and for a while she enjoyed the challenge and the pay but realised she needed creative work.

Since then, Virginia honed her writing skills working for TVNZ and the independent film industry, and for a feminist collective in Geneva, working on Women in Development issues by day while hosting dinners for her diplomat husband’s contacts by night — forty butterflied legs of lamb! Back in New Zealand as a single parent with a mortgage, creative writing was an unaffordable luxury. She surfed the turbulent waves of the neo-liberal revolution of the nineties, working senior jobs in government and business in Wellington and Auckland.  She was the founding CEO of the Arts Marketing Board, set up to promote NZ visual art, which thrived at first then succumbed to the drive to strip industry subsidies — no exception for the creative industries!

Once her son was at university, Virginia leaped off the corporate hamster wheel and wrote business biographies, framed as Nation Builders. She self-published the first one, on the founder of Tait Industries, which was picked up for national distribution. The next two were accepted for publication by Random House. Allan Hubbard, A Man Out of Time became a NZ best-seller.

On the brand-new Match.com, she met the love of her life, an American scientist who would become her husband, and they lived between Auckland and New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. She attended writers’ workshops and conferences in the United States, which resulted in her learner novel.

Relocating to Nelson, New Zealand, she embarked on an historical novel that melded her passion for history and dance. Saving Nijinsky is based on the true story of a brother and a sister who were world famous ballet dancers but who had very different fates. In post-war Paris, Bronia Nijinska attends the burial of her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, once known as the God of the Dance but lost to madness at the peak of his fame. The dual timeline story begins in 1953 Paris where Bronia aims to restore her brother’s reputation, which has been hi-jacked by jealous collaborators, and also regain her own story. The novel cuts between there and Tsarist Russia where Nijinsky tells his story of ambition and torment via the diary he kept as a star of the Ballets Russes. Nijinsky’s diary culminates in the legendary 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, which produced a literal riot in the theatre. The completed Saving Nijinsky won an award in the 2025 NZSA CompleteMS contest.

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