Nelson author Michael Henderson gave up a public service career to dedicate himself to the art of writing without achieving the commercial success or wider recognition that his talent deserved.
Mr Henderson, an award-winning short-story writer who had published a 1975 novel, the Log of a Superfluous Son, died in Christchurch on November 3 after an illness. He was 56.
Mr Henderson. was born in Nelson in 1942. He was educated at Nelson College – where he won prizes for public speaking – and Canterbury University, where he gained a law degree.
After university he took up a job with the then Department of Foreign Affairs. He said later that he thought it would be an ideal atmosphere for someone who wanted to write. Instead, he found there was little time and little encouragement for him to do so.
In an interview with the Nelson Evening Mail in 1982 he said he left Foreign Affairs because of his “concern for language and what is done with words, and my disgust at what was being done with these by politicians and some of my professional colleagues”.
A Fullbright Scholarship took him to the University of Iowa, where he became a teaching-writing fellow at its writer’s workshop, meeting and working with other writers from all over the world. This time he later described as the happiest of his life.
In 1975, the Log of a Superfluous Son was published, a sometimes challenging work for the reader written partly in a stream-of. consciousness style. The book took three years to write.
Mr Henderson was a cricketer as well as writer – he first played representative cricket for Nelson the year after he left school and later captained the New Zealand Universities side on a national tour and was included in one of its teams which toured Australia.
Cricket featured in his writing and he organised under-14 cricket in Motueka from the late 1980s.