Standard author bio written in the third person
Craig Cliff is the author of the novels Nailing Down the Saint and The Mannequin Makers, the story collection A Man Melting, which won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and the new collection, Offshore Service & Other Stories (Otago University Press, August 2026). His work has been translated into German, Spanish and Romanian. Craig reviews books for a range of New Zealand publications and was the convenor of the judging panel for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2017 and now lives with his family in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
Bonus Q&A with myself (May 2026)
Nailing Down the Saint came out in 2019, so... seven years.
Crickey.
And before you say it, yes, it was a seven year gap last time too.
And this new book only has half as many pages, so the lag is even more egregious this time, right?
No way. I'm a big believer that short story collections should be sub-200 pages.
In the words of Sum 41: All Killer, No Filler, eh? So are you saying your first collection, A Man Melting, which ran to 320 pages, was... bloated?
That collection came from an incredibly productive time in my writing life, so it's that fitting it is on the hefty side.
I was a 20-something white dude with lots to say.
Would I have cut some stories in hindsight? Some, like (ironically) 'Fat Camp', could probably have been honed to a finer point. And I might have moved some into a subsequent collection, if another short story collection was something I thought was possible, but my publisher at the time was very clear: We'll publish this book if you commit to writing a novel next. And by the way, make sure this collection is fat like a novel to trick people in book stores.
Wow. Did you have to fight to keep your new collection more svelte?
No, but I was asked to write one or two new stories over the summer and take out one or two of the older, previously published stories to keep it fresh. I ended up taking two stories out: one I cannibalised slightly for something else; the other may become a novel one day (lol). And I completed one new story, which I set in the lead up to Waitangi Day 2026, because it's always a treat to be able to write something super-contemporary that'll end up between two covers in six months.
So you've got one story that was written in 2026 in Offshore Service. What's the oldest story in the new collection?
I initially wrote 'The Kick Inside' in 2008, the year I tried to write one million words (and failed), so that's definitely the oldest.
It was a contender for the manuscript that became A Man Melting, but it broke the fourth wall like that another story I had written that year ('Seeds'). I think 'The Kick Inside' is a more interesting story, but 'Seeds' worked better in the context of that first collection and actually ended up opening it (and was later anthologised in The Penguin New Zealand Anthology, 2023, so some people must've liked it).
I have tweaked 'The Kick Inside' a few times over the years, but the fact that it closes my second story collection and is explicitly talking back to the start of A Man Melting is pleasing to me.
Do you ever worry about people being put off by these self-satisfying manoeuvres?
"Worry" isn't the right word. I "acknowledge" and then "dismiss".
I know some folks—certain kinds of reviewers and bad faith actors in the literary world—might hold up these "tricks" and call the preponderance of writers in my stories "navel-gazing". But you can't write for that kind of audience—or I can't.
I write for readers like me who lap this kind of thing up. Who look for connections, not just within a collection, but across a writer's other works, and with other books and films and music. Who would rather head down the occasional dead-end in the pursuit of fresh experiences than get served the same dish fourteen times with a slightly different garnish.
How do you feel about your last novel, Nailing Down the Saint, seven years on?
That gulf of time is... interesting.
 |
| The writer in simpler times |
Obviously we've all experienced a global pandemic since 2019.
Before COVID, actually, right around the time Nailing came out, I started having panic attacks for the first time. I used to get really nervous before things. As in, I did debating at high school and I used to throw up before most debates. And then when I had been at university for a while, I stopped getting nervous before things. At least, compared to how debilitating those nerves used to be.
And for over a decade I was a fairly chill, largely unfazed. I published books, spoke at festivals, all that racket. As an introvert and chronic overthinker, things I said in public would always loop in my head at night, but that wasn't anything new, anything debilitating.
Then I went on RNZ for an interview with Mark Amery about Nailing Down the Saint. I just walked up The Terrace from my job at the Ministry of Education, had a chat about my new book, no sweat. Mark was really nice. He asked some good questions, including something about music. I said I was really into the band Protomatyr—I'd listened to their album Relatives in Descent a lot while writing the second half of the novel—but Mark (and 99% of RNZ listeners) hadn't heard of them. All good. The interview wrapped, I took the lift down to the lobby and the world went wobbly. My heart was racing and I took a seat.
I sat there for at least fifteen minutes. I felt like a bread dough left to rise, only someone had put way too much yeast in the mix and there was the great upwelling of gludge pushing at my ears, behind my eyes, underneath my cranium.
It sucked. And then I was able to stand up and walk back down to work.
Another time, I went to an event a Unity Books on Willis Street, just as an audience member. But something set me off and I had to leave. I remember crying as I rode my bike home.
I was cracking up.
I started having a really bad time of it at work as well. There were personal agendas and vendettas and a lot of stupid shit—on top of the normal shit that comes from working in a central bureaucracy.
I had one kid at school and another at daycare and it was my job to get them ready in the mornings and do the drop-offs. I was so close to throwing a tantrum myself most mornings.
Then the pandemic came and all the triggers dried up for a while. But I still felt fragile.
Then I went and moved my family back to Dunedin (after we'd spent 2017 down here while I was the Burns Fellows), I changed professions, started and abandoned a doctorate, and basically did things that in hindsight were pretty brave and possibly unwise if I really was a fragile little crystal doodad—an ornament in your grandmother's china cabinet that the kids absolutely mustn't touch.
Which is a long way of saying Nailing Down the Saint is not only an artefact from a different time, but almost certainly contributed to my crack up.
I stared down the rational, materialist worldview (like, what if levitation and other miracles were real, or if not real real, at least a metaphor for truer plains of existence?) and the rational, materialist worldview did not run away with its tail between its legs.
I stared down misogyny and privilege and showed one path through (shutting up and ceding space), and—shockingly!—found the sound of my own voice anathema.
But I picked the novel up the other day and it fucking slaps. It does the things I was trying to do—subvert every narrative instinct Hollywood and Western storytelling have ingrained in us... which is a REALLY stupid thing to do in a novel.
But I'm glad I tried. I'm glad it exists.
What have you written since 2019?
Obviously some short stories. Around half of Offshore Service is from then onwards. And the older stories have all had rewrites since then too.
I've also been working on a novel. It may see the light of day, it may not.
Plus I've been reviewing books and judging competitions and trying to do those para-literary good deeds that keep the machine moving for everyone.
Did you use AI for this Q&A?
No, although in my weaker moments I was tempted.
I’ve had Q&A’s with myself on this page since I started this website in 2010, updating it every few years as I publish new books—or when I want to bury any mention of the books I thought I’d be publishing next.
I know AI is verboten for any serious writer. There’s the
ethics of how these models were trained—the stolen labour, the ingrained biases—and
the way they’ve made any use of the em-dash look suss. There’s the environmental
impact at a time we could and should be using the electricity grid to
transition away from fossil fuels. There’s the price of RAM, and the jobs and
livelihoods that are being lost…
But *this* exercise isn’t exactly serious. There was some appeal of having something else come up with the questions. But I’ve held firm.
Morals: intact.
Sanity: unchanged (that is: 12% sane).
Links
The Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like stink.
This Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing, reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Craig Cliff on The Academy of New Zealand Literature's website
The Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like stink.
This Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing, reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Craig Cliff on The Academy of New Zealand Literature's website
