Nationality New Zealand | ||
Full Name Graham John Billing Born 12 January 1936 ( 1936-01-12 ) Dunedin, New Zealand Occupation novelist, poet, journalist Died 11 December 2001, Wellington, New Zealand | ||
Graham John Billing (12 January 1936 – 11 December 2001) was a New Zealand novelist, journalist and poet. He was born in Dunedin, and educated at the Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago where his father was professor of economics.
He was a newspaper and radio journalist from 1958 to 1977. He had spent four years working on ships, which is reflected in the novel The Slipway. He was information officer for the New Zealand Antarctic Research Programme fron 1962 to 1964, reflected in his first novel Forbush and the Penguins. He was awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship in Dunedin in 1973. The poems in Changing Countries were written after two years teaching in Australia from 1974 to 1975.
An autobiographical element in The Slipway is his struggle with alcoholism. He also wrote three radio plays and the text for three non-fiction works South: Man and Nature in Antarctica (1964), New Zealand: The Sunlit Land (1966) and The New Zealanders (1975, 1979).