HighWire Format: ClothOverBoards

High Wire brings together Booker finalist writer Lloyd Jones and artist Euan Macleod. It is the first of a series of picture books written and made for grownups and designed to showcase leading New Zealand writers and artists working together in a collaborative and dynamic way. In High Wire the narrators playfully set out across the Tasman, literally on a high wire. Macleod’s striking drawings explore notions of home, and depict homeward thoughts and dreams. High Wire also enters a metaphysical place where art is made, a place where any ambitious art-making enterprise requires its participants to hold their nerve and not look down. It’s a beautifully considered small book which richly rewards the reader and stretches the notion of what the book can do.

Lloyd Jones is one of New Zealand’s most eminent writers. His bestselling novel Mister Pip won several illustrious prizes and awards including the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the 2007 Montana Medal for fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

Euan Macleod’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including Te Papa, the National Gallery of Australia and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. He has won a number of major prizes including the Archibald Prize. In 2010 a monograph, Euan Macleod: The Painter in the Painting, written by Gregory O’Brien and published by Piper Press, was released.