23 An Intimate Evening with Lloyd Jones

New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones became an international name in 2007 when Mister Pip was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, but he had been writing to acclaim for more than 20 years. Jones first encountered the setting of Bougainville, where Mister Pip takes place, as a journalist in the 1980s when he reported on al conflict that eventually left 20,000 dead. To take from that bloody experience a novel of such appeal that it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has been published in 33 countries is remarkable. Of his latest novel, Hand Me Down World, the Guardian says, “Jones is a daring writer who can be relied on to ignore expectation and is becoming one of the most honest and thought-provoking novelists working today.”