We celebrate a newly-launched publication, We Need To Talk About Norman: New Zealand’s Lost Leader, by journalist, editor and biographer, Denis Welch, who was our writer-in-residence in 2013.  

 

The book traces the impact and lost potential of Prime Minister Norman Kirk’s brief time in office in 1970s New Zealand.  

 

Denis Welch says, “It’s 10 years now since I was lucky enough to be awarded a Randell Cottage residency, and it has taken that long for the book I was working on then to be published. You might say it took longer than expected! But those early days at the cottage helped to lay the foundations of We Need To Talk About Norman, which Quentin Wilson Publishing has now brought out. 

 

The research and writing I did during my six-month stay got me really started on what in the end became an extended biographical essay on the significance of Norman Kirk in this nation’s politics – a great 20th-century leader who, I suggest, still speaks to us (with compelling moral force) in the 21st century.”