Author photo: Ebony Lamb
Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel Delirious (2024), which won the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and the YA novel Aspiring (2020), which won the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. His novel The Miserables won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and Nineteen Widows Under Ash was joint runner-up for the Deutz Prize for Fiction in the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Fainter was runner-up for the Montana Medal for Fiction in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and his novels have been long-listed three times on the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 Damien receieved an Arts Laureate Award. Max Gate (2013), a novel about Thomas Hardy, was a fiction finalist in the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards. It was also published in the UK and US by Aardvark Bureau.
Damien is a professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers.
