Stevan Eldred-Grigg is one of the most widely known, critically acclaimed and controversial writers of his generation in New Zealand.

Born on the back seat of a speeding taxi, the young writer grew up in suburban Christchurch. After graduating with a doctorate in history from the Australian National University the writer first became known as the author of A Southern Gentry, a book which has now sold more copies than almost any other history published in New Zealand. Quick, vivid, democratic – it leads the reader onto his other lively works of New Zealand history: A New History of Canterbury, Pleasures of the Flesh, Working People and The Rich.

Stevan Eldred-Grigg has become still more widely known as a novelist. Oracles and Miracles, his first and bestselling novel, recently became the first major novel by a living New Zealand writer to be published in China. 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]

Shanghai Boy, his newest novel, is a provocative book about fathers and sons, passion and Shanghai. A leathery old father is slowly dying of cancer in New Zealand. His son, who has just hit fifty, falls fiercely in love with a young man, one of his students, at a university in China. The young man goes missing. The old man dies. Has there been a murder? Two murders? Shanghai increasingly takes centre stage: a pulsing city of crowded streets and clouding smog; motley smells and mindless noise; a complex and contradictory place that leaves the middle-aged son both horrified and aroused. Shanghai Boy, the first novel by any New Zealand writer to focus on the lives of ordinary people in contemporary China, has just been published by Random House under the Vintage imprint.