Peter King

Peter King has been a New Zealand journalist for over thirty years. He normally specialises in science, technology and engineering as it affects society and politics but came to writing fiction when he realised that this dry-as-dust topic needed a much more juicy wrapper.

Peter's YA series, Changels, is not his first fiction writing project but the first that he has published. It was composed on an HTC mobile phone and at 670,000 words is probably the largest fiction work written entirely on a mobile (mostly while commuting).

Peter wanted to write an entertaining YA series that went beyond harmless, conventional (i.e 'white') tropes and clichés by challenging young people with the question: "if you really did have super powers how could you really change the world for the better?" To answer that, however, you need to understand what exactly is wrong with the world in the first place, so Changels takes the reader there from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Moldova, the neighbourhoods of Washington DC and New Orleans to Yemen and the Amazon. Changels explores one abiding theme - discrimination based on genetic inheritance. In an age when genetic science makes more and more possible Changels questions why it is that a person's skin colour, gender, body type and other inherited attributes should define their future.

Genetic engineering and artificial intelligence were also motivators behind Animal Pharm, a story of a tiny New Zealand farm in the not so distant future. A comedy, the story is also an unlikely tale of the collision between Chinese Triads and a Wairarapa sheep pharmer and his loyal talking sheepdog.

His latest series: Testaments of the Maji is a form of "real magicalism". Set in a world which overlaps our own like an uncomfortable dream, it is an exploration of colonisation, the re-fabulation of the past, and the status of religious stories compared to irreligious ones.

Peter objects to the role of the third person narrator because disembodied cameras do not exist in reality. All cameras have crews. Ignoring the camera is a convention of movie story telling only and certainly doesn’t happen to news crews. He sees writing as acting and adapts his writing style to the narrator’s voice.

Peter’s writing was influenced by a diet of classical literature and poetry, science fiction and fantasy, travel writing and New Zealand writing (especially Maori authors). Favourite re-reads include: Dracula (Bram Stoker), God Knows (Joseph Heller), Pounamu Pounamu (Witi Ihimaera), The Faber Book of Reportage, and the poems of TS Elliot. Authors of influence include Alexander McCall Smith, Joanne Rowling, Madeleine L'Engle, Salman Rushdie, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Miguel de Cervantes, and Jane Austen. Authors whose techniques or thoughts on writing he finds most useful include: Alexander McCall Smith, Annie Proulx, John Fowles, A.A Milne, and most important of all Robert McKee.

for more about peter, including poetry visit http://peter.allmedia.co.nz