Peter Wells

Peter Northe Wells (8 February 1950 – 18 February 2019) was a New Zealand writer, filmmaker, and historian. He was mainly known for his fiction, but also explored his interest in gay and historical themes in a number of expressive drama and documentary films from the 1980s onwards.

Career

Film Wells's first feature film was Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with Stewart Main. This take on New Zealand's colonial beginnings was selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and represented an expressionistic alternative to the "man alone" machismo that dominated New Zealand film in the 1970s and 80s.

Writing In the years that followed, Wells concentrated on developing his writing career. His short stories and novels have been widely praised. In 1996 he collaborated with theatre director Colin McColl on an operatic dramatization of Katherine Mansfield's Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts. Two short stories from his 1991 collection Dangerous Desires have been filmed to date: Of Memory & Desire, the tale of a Japanese couple travelling around New Zealand, was adapted by Niki Caro as her first feature film in 1997. The same year, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed 1960s coming of age story One of Them! as an hour-long short.

In 1998, with Stephanie Johnson, he founded the Auckland Writers Festival, and in 2016 he founded a festival to promote LGBTQI writers called same same but different (ssbd) which includes an annual prize The Peter Wells Writing Award. In the 2006 New Year Honours, Wells was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and film. He was awarded the Michael King Fellowship in 2011.

In 2009 Wells was awarded a New Zealand non-fiction literary prize, convened by CLL (Copyright Licensing Ltd) to write a series of biographical essays on William Colenso, entitled The Hungry Heart. The book was anticipated to "not be a conventional biography, but an essay series that bears directly on the episodes of heartbreak, loneliness, and sometimes horror that chequered the life of this gifted renaissance man – printer, writer, botanist, explorer, ex-missionary and intellectual maverick". The book was published in 2011. Journalist Geoffrey Vine, reviewing the book for the Otago Daily Times, wrote that it had "set a new standard in the writing of New Zealand history and Wells deserves every accolade".

Personal life Wells, who was gay, was married to the writer Douglas Lloyd Jenkins. Wells died from prostate cancer at Mercy Hospice in Auckland on 18 February 2019.

Works