CK Stead's prizewinning receives backlash

New Zealand writer CK Stead, who in March won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story "Last Season's Man," has been attacked by NZ novelist Keri Hulme, UK satire magazine Private Eye, several blogs, and the widow and literary executor of novelist Nigel Cox, who all see his prize-winning story as a thinly veiled insult against Cox, who died of cancer in 2006.

Cox, whose novels have won the Bucklands Memorial Literary Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and have been repeatedly runners-up for the Montana New Zealand Book Award, criticized Stead's writing in the literary magazine Quote Unquote in 1994. In 2007, the critique was republished online, leading Stead to successfully solicit its removal.

"Last Season's Man" tells of a Croatian dramatist who is dismissed as a "has been" in a critique published by a competing writer. When the writer dies, the insulted dramatist woos his widow and reestablishes his fame and glory. Those familiar with the Quote Unquote controversy have drawn parallels between Stead's own literary rivalries and those of his character, seeing the story has a twisted revenge fantasy, with Cox's widow saying that she is "shocked" and his executor insisting that the story is "sickening." Keri Hulme, who won the Booker Prize for The Bone People in 1985, has called the story "fucking tame, timid, awful insofar as the writing is concerned, and vicious in the revealed background."

Stead, who is 77 and has been publishing since 1964, has nonchalantly dismissed all criticisms while rebuking his naysayers, insisting that the story is pure fiction and the ignorant misinterpretations of others are no fault of his own.