My Father’s Island: a memoir by Adam Dudding

Late last year Victoria University Press published a brilliant new memoir/biography by Auckland journalist and author Adam Dudding. The book, about Adam’s father Robin Dudding, a man considered to be the greatest New Zealand literary editor of his generation, signals a radical departure in the New Zealand memoir genre.

​Sitting somewhere between memoir and biograpy it is written from the personal perspective of the protagonist’s son, as a kind of voyage around his father. Robin Dudding was editor of Landfall in the 1950s and then went on to establish his own literary journal, Islands providing a crucial alternative publication platform for all of New Zealand’s major writers. 

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