Collection: Damien Wilkins

Author photo: Ebony Lamb

Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books, including the novel Delirious (2024), which won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and the young adult 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 longlisted three times on the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 Damien received an Arts Laureate Award. Max Gate (2013), a novel about Thomas Hardy, was a fiction finalist in the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards and was 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.