Maxine Alterio — days lived well

'A day without writing, reading or storytelling feels to me as though it has not been well lived.'

Another writer of Slightly Peculiar Love Stories, Maxine lives here in Dunedin. She's warm, intelligent, funny, and incredibly hard-working. Diligent also comes to mind. When we belonged to the same writing group some years ago, she read us a single story month after month as she honed and re-honed it to the point where it won a major UK short story prize. Her stories have been well anthologised and her first collection Live News and Other Stories appeared in 2005. Her best-selling novel Ribbons of Grace was published in 2007.

Maxine is currently enrolled in a PhD in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she is working on a thesis based on the memoirs of First World War nurses, and her second novel, Lives We Leave Behind. I'm looking forward to that.

Maxine once had an English butler for ten days. The ingredients of her slightly peculiar story include a physio pool, a steep path, a banana and a file…