The post-war scene has been enlivened by much new work in fiction. In the short story A. P. Gaskell's The Big Game, Janet Frame's The Lagoon, and Maurice Shadbolt's The New Zealanders, and work by J. R. Cole, Maurice Gee, Phillip Wilson, Maurice Duggan, and O. E. Middleton illustrate that this form, out of favour beyond these shores, is still effectively practised here. The novelists have come into their own with the work of three writers of considerable staying power, who have each written a number of books, Dan Davin, James Courage, and Guthrie Wilson. Davin has based himself on the experiences of the war and on his memories of his upbringing in an Irish enclave in Southland; the original but flawed Cliffs of Fall and the Careyesque No Remittance are his best books. Courage has made good use of his Canterbury pastoral background in Fires in the Distance and The Young Have Secrets but has broken free of it with profit in The Visit to Penmorten; he is gifted with a tranquil, graceful style and writes the best prose of the three. Guthrie Wilson's later novels have been disappointing, but his most recent, The Incorruptibles, is a distinguished achievement.

In her novel Owls Do Cry Janet Frame gives an impression of tragic and disordered power, but does not surpass the best of her short stories. Her three later novels show a sustained achievement. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Spinster conquers new material, the Maori school infant room, in a brilliant first novel, whose successor is less rewarding. Ian Cross's The Godboy is a strongly drawn study of troubled adolescence from within, and his second novel, The Backward Sex, shows, in a rather similar theme, the same insight; Cross's After Anzac Day is a more complex book. M. K. Joseph's I'll Soldier No More, although its scene lies among the events of the war, is primarily a successful piece of characterisation. His second novel, A Pound of Saffron, deals successfully with university life. Ruth France's The Race has a perfection of form in its contrast of action, a storm-tossed yacht race, and inaction, anxious women ashore, which makes it much more assured than most first novels. Its successor Ice-Cold River fulfils this promise. Some interesting work has been produced, too, by Roderick Finlayson, Marilyn Duckworth, and Helen Wilson, with good new novels, too, from Bill Pearson, Maurice Gee, David Ballantyne and Phillip Wilson.

The talents of Helen Wilson were displayed more directly in her autobiography My First Eighty Years, an account equally witty and courageous of various forms of pioneering by a woman of great wisdom. She vies with the novelists and short-story writers in capturing the authentic note of New Zealand life. Where Helen Wilson is excursive, both in time and place, Dennis McEldowney has necessarily turned inwards: The World Regained is a moving story of recovery from mortal illness. E. H. McCormick, New Zealand's major critic, has added new cubits to his stature with his biographical study of one phase in the life of the New Zealand painter, Frances Hodgkins: The Expatriate concentrates on the relations of this brilliant woman with her own neglectful country, a satisfying parallel to the life of that other great exile, Katherine Mansfield.

Conditions are only just beginning to emerge which favour the development of a New Zealand theatre offering scope to original playwrights. Here Isobel Andrews, Bruce Mason, Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter, and Stella Jones have achieved most and more may be expected of them.

New Zealand has an extensive literature of exploration. In this field G. E. Mannering'sWith Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps (1891) chronicled the struggles of early mountaineers, and in Mr Explorer Douglas John Pascoe presents an extraordinary character, recluse, explorer, naturalist, partly by biography, partly through his own writings.

In Arawata Bill, a sequence of poems about a rather similar character, Denis Glover offers his most satisfying work. He and Curnow have gone on writing poetry and the stature of both has increased, even though many new figures have emerged in the years since youth and hardship were a first stimulus to their generation. The exact description of nature by Basil Dowling and the poems of sensibility of Charles Brasch, their contemporaries, remained unshaped by the events of the thirties. Since then a new generation of poets has come to maturity, led by James K. Baxter (also eminent as a critic). The roll call of their names – Hubert Witheford, Louis Johnson, Robert Chapman, W. H. Oliver, Keith Sinclair (who remind us how often historians are poets), W. Hart Smith, Kendrick Smithyman, Charles Spear, Ruth Dallas, Fleur Adcock, Alistair Campbell, C. K. Stead, Pat Wilson, M. K. Joseph, and more recently Alan Roddick, Peter Bland, and Stuart Slater – is somewhat bewildering evidence of the widespread competence in poetry of those who have inherited the domains pioneered by Mason, Fairburn, Glover, Curnow, and Ursula Bethell (who have most influenced the practice of others). Some 10 years ago the present writer in a broadcast committed himself to the judgment that New Zealand was passing through a poetic golden age without realising it. He does not see any reason to modify this statement, as unfortunately these poets have not yet been accorded a degree of recognition which would show an awareness of their quality.

The only modern Maori poet, Hone Tuwhare, writes in English. Barry Mitcalfe, known also as a short-story writer, has made some interesting translations of traditional Maori poetry.