Lloyd Jones

Lloyd David Jones (born 23 March 1955) is a New Zealand author. His novel Mister Pip won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Early life, education and family Jones was born in Lower Hutt in 1955, and attended Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington. Despite fulfilling the requirements of a political science degree, Jones was unable to graduate from university at the time due to library fines owing; he eventually completed his course of study and graduated in 2007. He was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Victoria University in May 2009.

Jones's older brother was property investor and former politician Sir Bob Jones. He also has three older sisters. His other son, Sam Duckor-Jones, is an artist and poet.

Literary career After leaving university and spending time travelling overseas, Jones became a sports reporter at The Evening Post, and began writing fiction. His first novel, Gilmore's Dairy (1985), was a satirical novel about a young man growing up in a small New Zealand town, and was followed by Splinter (1988), a novel set in Lower Hutt with two primary narratives (one about an early immigrant and the other about a magazine editor). Like his later work, these two early novels blended suburban realism, black comedy and originality.

In 1988, Jones was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. In 1991 he published a short fiction collection, Swimming for Australia (1991), which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. It was adapted for the stage by Carl Nixon, New Zealand novelist and playwright.

In May 2007, Jones won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. The novel is set during the Bougainville Civil War of the early 1990s in Papua New Guinea. The book was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007.

Jones was the 2007 recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.

Jones was inspired to investigate his family history by the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and published a memoir, A History of Silence, in 2013.

In 2015 Jones spent a year in Australia as a resident writer at the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. 2002 Shortlisted for Montana Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction (New Zealand) for Here At the End of the World We Learn to Dance 2003 Montana Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction for The Book of Fame 2004 New Zealand Post Book Honour Award for Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer 2005 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Commended Title) for Paint Your Wife 2008 Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship 2008 Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate 2008 Richard & Judy Book Club - Mister Pip, 10 pick of the year 2008 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement 2009 Honorary Doctorate Degree from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Selected works Gilmore's Dairy (1985) Splinter (1988) Swimming to Australia, and Other Stories (1991) Biografi: An Albanian Quest (1993) – a New York Times Notable Book. This House Has Three Walls (1997) Choo Woo (1998) Book of Fame (2000) Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002) Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer (2003) Everything You Need to Know about the World by Simon Eliot, illustrated by Timon Maxey (Four Winds Press, 2004); US title, Everything You Need to Know About the World (2007) Paint Your Wife (2004) Mister Pip (2006) Hand Me Down World (2010) The Man in the Shed (2011) A History of Silence: A memoir (Auckland: Penguin, 2013) The Cage (2018) The Fish (2022)