Peter Northe WellsMNZM (8 February 1950 – 18 February 2019) was a New Zealand writer, filmmaker, and historian.[1] He was mainly known for his fiction, but also explored his interest in gay and historical themes in a number of expressive
drama and
documentary films from the 1980s onwards.
Career
Film
Wells's first feature film was Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with
Stewart Main.[2] This take on New Zealand's colonial beginnings was selected to screen at the
Cannes Film Festival, and represented an expressionistic alternative to the "
man alone" machismo that dominated New Zealand film in the 1970s and 80s.[3][4]
Writing
In the years that followed, Wells concentrated on developing his writing career. His short stories and novels have been widely praised. In 1996 he collaborated with theatre director
Colin McColl on an operatic dramatization of
Katherine Mansfield's
Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts. Two short stories from his 1991 collection Dangerous Desires have been filmed to date: Of Memory & Desire, the tale of a Japanese couple travelling around New Zealand, was adapted by
Niki Caro as her first feature film in 1997. The same year, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed 1960s coming of age story One of THEM! as an hour-long short.[5]
In 1998, with Stephanie Johnson, he founded the
Auckland Writers Festival, and in 2016 he founded a festival to promote
LGBTQI writers called same same but different (ssbd) which includes an annual prize The Peter Wells Writing Award.[6][7]
In 2009 Wells was awarded a New Zealand non-fiction literary prize, convened by CLL (Copyright Licensing Ltd) to write a series of biographical essays on William Colenso, entitled The Hungry Heart. The book was anticipated to "not be a conventional biography, but an essay series that bears directly on the episodes of heartbreak, loneliness, and sometimes horror that chequered the life of this gifted renaissance man – printer, writer, botanist, explorer, ex-missionary and intellectual maverick".[citation needed] The book was published in 2011. Journalist Geoffrey Vine, reviewing the book for the Otago Daily Times, wrote that it had "set a new standard in the writing of New Zealand history and Wells deserves every accolade".[10]
Personal life
Wells, who was gay, was married to the writer
Douglas Lloyd Jenkins.[11][7] Wells died from prostate cancer at Mercy Hospice in Auckland on 18 February 2019.[12]
^"Wells, Peter". New Zealand Book Council. Archived from
the original on 20 February 2019. Retrieved 19 February 2019.
^"Civic Theatre Foyer". teara.govt.nz.
New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatū Taonga. 2009. Retrieved 18 February 2019. In the 1980s Auckland's grand
Civic Theatre was deteriorating and threatened with demolition. This inspired the local writer Peter Wells to make The mighty Civic, a film about its place in the city's cultural history, which captured the dream-like qualities of the theatre's spaces and helped to galvanise public support for its retention.[permanent dead link]
^"Peter Wells". NZ on Screen. Retrieved 19 February 2019.