First published in 1984, Some Other Country quickly became established as New Zealand's essential single-volume anthology of short stories, and has since been enjoyed by many thousands of visitors, students and readers of all kinds. Now this fourth edition adds four new writers, bringing the collection completely up to date with the diverse energies of New Zealand life and writing. The country to be found in these pages is not the place depicted in glossy picture books or economic profiles. But it is a real place, composed of that blend of accuracy and vision which only the imagination, committed to language and experience, can supply.

It is the New Zealand of Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield, of Frank Sargeson and Maurice Gee, of Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Some Other Country is a collection of stories from the body of New Zealand writing that began with the work of the young expatriate writer, Katherine Mansfield. It includes well-known stories by major writers including Vincent O'Sullivan, Joy Cowley, C. K. Stead, Owen Marshall and Keri Hulme, alongside stories by writers who have come into prominence in the last 20 years, such as Barbara Anderson, Fiona Farrell, Emily Perkins, Damien Wilkins and Alice Tawhai. Some Other Country represents the editors' choice of simply 'the best we could find'.

Author Biography

Marion McLeod worked for several years as a feature writer at the New Zealand Listener and later as a script consultant with the film and television company Gibson Group, for whom she devised the television drama series Cover Story. A widely respected reviewer of contemporary fiction, Marion McLeod was the co-editor of the Oxford University Press anthology of New Zealand women's fiction, Women's Work. Bill Manhire is one of New Zealand's finest practising poets. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry five times, most recently for Lifted, and his collected poems were published by VUP and Carcanet in 1990. He has also published several works of fiction, and The New Land: A Picture Book won the Buckland Prize in 1990. He was the inaugural Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate in 1996â 97, received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate award in 2005, and in 2007 received the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry. He directs the now famous creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington.