WRITERS ON RECORD

PAUL DIAMOND

Improving the lot of local writers, many of whom struggle to make a living from writing, has been the aim of the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) since it was founded in 1934. Known as PEN New Zealand until 1994, and still affiliated to PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) International today, the NZSA is the country’s oldest arts organisation.

The society was responsible for establishing the Authors’ Fund, which recompenses authors for the use of their books in libraries. When this was launched in 1973, New Zealand was the first English-speaking country to have a ‘public lending right’ system. The campaign for the fund was led by writer and broadcaster Ian Cross (1925–2019) at the request of PEN’s then president, Marie Bullock. Initially sceptical, Cross discovered ‘that the library system was truly expropriating the potential earnings of writers, because most of the writers’ readership came from books borrowed from libraries’.

Cross was among the authors interviewed as part of an oral history project commissioned by the society in 1999 to record its story. The NZSA also wanted to document the writers’ own careers, and their memories of New Zealand’s literary history. The interviews, held in the Turnbull’s Oral History and Sound Archive, were carried out by the historian and biographer Michael King, together with writers Alison Gray and Sarah Gaitanos. As King explained in a letter to one of the interviewees, the poet and children’s author Ruth Dallas, the interviews were ‘an opportunity to document the history of writerly connections’.

In his interview with Gaitanos in 2004, Cross spoke about how he had commissioned research firm McNair to do the first-ever survey of authors’ incomes. The survey, which showed that authors were earning on average $4.50 per week for their books, helped win public support and convince politicians to act. ‘We were not seeking a state subsidy, we were seeking recompense for the earnings which writers lost through the free library use of their books,’ Cross recalled.

Now known as the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors and administered by the National Library, the fund is currently worth $2.4 million. The NZSA continues to advocate ‘for the inclusion of digital lending, an Educational Lending Right…and to ask for further cash injection to fund compensation for these copyright exceptions’.

Extracts from the 20-plus interviews of the original oral history project are now available as podcasts on the NZSA website. Along with Cross, interviewees include Gordon McLauchlan, Lauris Edmond, Kevin Ireland, Tessa Duder, Witi Ihimaera and Joy Cowley.

DESCRIPTION Ian Cross, journalist, novelist, editor, and campaigner for recompensing authors for the free use of their books in libraries, 1985.

MAKER / ARTIST Kenneth Quinn (1920–2013)

REFERENCE Portraits of prominent New Zealanders (ATL-Group-00559: 1/4-089233-F)