Ruth Dallas

Overview

Ruth Dallas (1919–2008) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most distinctive, respected and influential literary voices. Drawing on Dallas’s 1991 autobiography, Curved Horizon, her writing notebooks and journals, and letters and interviews, Diana Morrow shows how the girl whose first published work appeared in the children’s pages of the Southland Daily News grew up to become the internationally acclaimed author of nine poetry collections, a book of short stories and eight children’s books. In this beautifully written and generously illustrated biography, Morrow gives us the Ruth Dallas that her family and friends knew and loved: a private person with a lively outlook on life; a serious and informed writer with an impish sense of humour; and a writer of rare clarity and insight whose work has enriched the lives of generations of readers in New Zealand and around the world.

Author Biography

Diana Morrow, based in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, is the author of Kate Edger: The life of a pioneer feminist (Otago University Press, 2021). She has also co-authored several local histories, among them Urban Village: The story of Ponsonby, Freeman’s Bay and St. Mary’s Bay (2008), as well as a general history of New Zealand, Changing Times: New Zealand since 1945 (2013). She co-edited and contributed to City of Enterprise: A history of Auckland business (2006) and Jewish Lives in New Zealand (2011) and wrote a chapter for A History of the New Zealand Foreign Service (2022).