Happy Birthday Katherine Mansfield!

Today is Katherine Mansfield’s 128th birthday party, and it also happens to be the day after my book was officially published. That means you can buy it now!  But I also encourage you to go to your local bookseller and buy it there, so they feel like reordering it.

In honour of KM’s big day, I am having an opening this evening at her birthplace. I drew my very first comic for this project set in this Victorian villa, but it didn’t make it into the book.

The house did, though, in a few different places:

Also, here, depicting when I first visited her house:

There’s a new museum director now, and all the velvet cordons have been thrown away and you actually can go into the rooms, standing in the places Katherine once stood. Also, I’ve been allowed to place some of Mansfield’s possessions alongside my manuscript pages – the hei tiki she wore to Queen’s College in London, the pounamu pendent belonging to her brother, Leslie. Also, I have her father’s gun hanging on the wall, as a Chekovian lesson in narrative.

Come along! Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, 25 Tinakori Road, Wellington. I also have all my notebooks piled up on her father’s desk, and you are free to flick through and discover all of my secrets.