Writer's File
Jenny Robin Jones
In brief
Jenny Robin Jones is a fiction writer and non-fiction writer specializing in New Zealand history. Her short stories have been produced on Radio New Zealand, and have appeared in literary journals and in anthologies. Her first book, Writers in Residence: a journey with pioneer New Zealand writers was published by Auckland University Press in 2004. Her second book No Simple Passage: the journey of the London to New Zealand, 1842 - a ship of hope, was published by Random House in 2011.
Bio
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jones, Jenny Robin is a fiction writer and non-fiction writer specializing in New Zealand history. She describes herself as a ‘feral historian’ or, as fellow feral historian Susan Butterworth says, one of ‘those who make an uncertain living writing history on contract, rather than within an institution’.Jenny Jones has worked as a teacher. She was also executive Director of the New Zealand Society of Authors 1988-2001, and the Editor of Education Today 2002-2004. From 1977-1990 she published under her married name, Jenny Moiser, and since then has published as Jenny Robin Jones.
Her short stories have been produced on Radio New Zealand and have appeared in literary journals such as Landfall and Takahe. Her writing has also been included in the following anthologies, Another 100 NZ Short Short Stories (Tandem, 1998), NZ Short Short stories (Tandem, 1999), and It Looks Better on You: New Zealand women writers on their friendships, edited by Jane Westaway and Tessa Copland (Longacre Press, 2003).
Her first book, Writers in Residence: a journey with pioneer New Zealand writers was published by Auckland University Press in 2004. A review by Mark Williams in the Sunday Star Times stated, ‘Jenny Jones, in a readable and refreshingly non-judgmental study, gives vivid life to some of the intellectual shapers of colonial New Zealand… Jones’ pioneers are the writers who come at the beginning of literary activity in this country’. Margie Thomson in the New Zealand Herald wrote, ‘Jones is an exhaustive researcher, but her light touch, obvious enjoyment of her subject, and eye for amusing detail lift these figures off the page and into our imaginations.’
Her second book No Simple Passage: the journey of the London to New Zealand, 1842 - a ship of hope, was published by Random House in 2011.
