Stevan Eldred-Grigg is one of the most controversial novelists and historians in New Zealand. Born on the back seat of a speeding taxi, he grew up in a tumultuous household in suburban Christchurch. His mother, a stroppy working-class woman, had the gift of the gab. His father, careful and precise, came from a conservative ‘old family’. The varying opinions in the family led to a questioning of life, history and society. The young writer graduated with a doctorate in history from the Australian National University. The Great Wrong War, his latest history book, was published at the end of last year. Quick, vivid, democratic and questioning, the work probes social life in New Zealand during the murderous years of the First World War. The sincerity and the malice, the stubbornness and the yearnings of warring New Zealanders are central to the story. The Great Wrong War has polarised readers. ‘We have been put on trial and found wanting,’ says one reviewer. ‘Eldred-Grigg would have us believe that Germany bore virtually no responsibility for the war at all,’ says another. Angry readers have gone so far as to claim that the book is a disloyal attack on the people of New Zealand. Diggers, Hatters and Whores, a sweeping yet intimate history of New Zealand society in the gold rushes, was published in 2008 and welcomed with rave reviews: ‘simply the best’ … ‘lavishly illustrated and lively’ … ‘big, rollicking’ … ‘a tour de force … immensely readable’. Stevan Eldred-Grigg also has become widely known as a novelist. Oracles and Miracles, a runaway bestseller, became the first major novel by a living New Zealand writer to be published in China. Shanghai Boy, his latest novel, explores a tortuous love affair between a New Zealander and a Chinese young man in the immense city of Shanghai. ‘Age, no problem! Gender, no problem. Constellation, no problem. Body, sex, race, all no fucking problem. Feeling, you know! Feeling! That is everything.’ Other novels written by him include The Shining City, Mum, The Siren Celia, Gardens of Fire, Blue Blood and Kaput! Few contemporary New Zealand or Australian novelists have written about subjects so varied and challenging – and in such a variety of genres and styles. ‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing’. [David Hill, New Zealand Herald, 25 August 2001]