Nationality New Zealand Name Peter Wells | Role Writer Education University of Auckland | |
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Notable awards New Zealand Order of Merit Movies Desperate Remedies, Memory & Desire, Georgie Girl Books Journey to a Hanging: The Even, The Hungry Heart: Jo, Long loop home, The duration of a kiss, Lucky Bastard Similar People Jennifer Ward‑Lealand, Niki Caro, Georgina Beyer, Annie Goldson, Lisa Chappell | ||
Peter Northe Wells, MNZM (born 1950) is an award-winning writer and filmmaker from New Zealand.
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Although today he is mainly known for his fiction, Peter Wells has explored his interest in gay and historical themes, in a number of expressive drama and documentary films since the 1980s.
The first and (up to 2008) last feature film made by Peter Wells is Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with Stewart Main. This take on New Zealand's colonial beginnings was selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and represented an expressionistic alternative to the man alone machismo that dominated NZ film in the 1970s and 80s.
Wells has since concentrated on developing his writing career. His short stories and novels have been widely praised. But he has not entirely abandoned drama. In 1996 he collaborated with theatre director Colin McColl on an operatic dramatization of Katherine Mansfield's Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts.
Two short stories from his awardwinning 1991 collection Dangerous Desires have been filmed to date: Of Memory & Desire, the tale of a Japanese couple travelling around New Zealand, was adapted by Niki Caro for her first feature film in 1997. The same year, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed sixties coming of age story One of THEM! as an hour-long short.
Wells' 2003 novel Iridescence was a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and a finalist in the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize.
In 2006 Peter Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and film.