Okay, here's a question:
If a person was born in New Zealand, grew up there, married and had kids in the country, and then, after almost thirty years as a New Zealander, moved to Australia where they bought a house, got a job, paid Australian taxes, etc...
If, after moving to Australia they started writing books, which they published through Australian publishing firms and sold largely in Australian bookshops and news agencies...
Would that person be a New Zealand author or an Australian author? And, if you were to have a book display that showcased Australian and New Zealand authors, and you were going to set up this display by having the Australian authors in one area and the New Zealand authors in another area, where would you put the books by that author?
On a related point, if they wrote children's books, and you were going to put together a display of Australian children's books, would you include their works?
2 comments:
I guess that all depends on what criteria the bookshop/ library ran by: origin of author, audience, present abode of writer...It's a tough question that has no simple answer and has got me thinking.
I know that modern Irish fiction writers are frequently absorbed into the category 'British writers'. In Ireland we have a sections in bookstores for 'Irish writers' / 'Irish interest' and the foreign writers are cetergorised by genre and ordered by surname. In English bookstores though (as far as I know) they don't make any differences.
Maybe there isn't a difference. Sure there are cultural differences between IR-UK and AUS-NZ but if it's children's writing or modern fiction than in universal in taste surely no distinction based on nationality needs to be made.
Libraries create these arbitrary categories all the time for the sake of displays.
We need a theme, so we just pull one out of the air and see how many books (with pretty covers) we have that can fit in with that theme.
Children's literature is always a bit of a winner with a display - even if you work in an academic library - but the themes become even more important.
A public library can usually go with "animals" or "pirates" for a theme, but when this is a display of Curriculum material for academics and university students, you have to get a bit more intellectual about it all.
That said, I have managed to sneak in the occasional "pirate" theme...
And the Aust/NZ thing can be, shall we say, "interesting". Sometimes we are brothers, sometimes we are rivals. It can be strangely influenced by the football calendar.
Much easier in a bookshop - you just wack 'em all into "children's".
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