Damien Wilkins
Author of ‘The Glove’
Damien Wilkins is best known for his adult novels, including most recently Max Gate and Dad Art. He grew up in Lower Hutt and still visits the Dowse Art Gallery and the Hutt Park Golf Course. He is the Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, where former students include Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, poets Airini Beautrais and Marty Smith, short story writers Breton Dukes and Emma Martin, essayists Ashleigh Young and Anna Sanderson. He also wrote for the television series The Insiders Guide to Happiness. He records music under the band name The Close Readers. His two daughters like to shut their doors when he plays his guitar.
'I collected the Biggles books when I was a boy. I also loved the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. Mostly it was war comics which hooked me into reading. Reading and dreaming. I needed something to show me that Lower Hutt wasn’t the whole world and that one day I, too, might have the chance to fly planes and cut the heads off snakes – hopefully at the same time.'