A life full of adventure

Novelist Damien Wilkins. Photo / Babiche Martens

"It was a mad, wonderful experiment for my family," says Wellington writer Damien Wilkins of his new novel, Somebody Loves Us All. Experiment? Images spring to mind of Wilkins, his public servant wife Maree, and their two daughters, 15-year-old Geraldine and 10-year-old Greta, turned into human guinea-pigs in the name of literary research. But no, Wilkins is talking about his sojourn in France last year as the New Zealand Post Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow.

"Before we left, we felt the fellowship was going to be challenging. My grasp of French was stuck in 5th form and, as for the girls, we enrolled them in the Alliance Francaise in Wellington for three weeks, so at least they could say 'bonjour' and 'au revoir'.

Once we arrived in Menton, though, they picked up the language quickly, and because they attended schools there, they pulled us into the life of the community. We got around to people's homes and became actively involved in school life. We loved it so much we stayed on beyond the nine months of the residency. In the end, we were very sad to leave. Every day there was an adventure."

In truth, Wilkins' life has always had the frisson of adventure about it.

As a child, his passion was reading - the Biggles series and classic boyhood thrillers by Hammond Innes - rather than writing. Becoming an author only came after stints playing football, acting (he just missed out on the lead in Ian Mune's 1976 film adaptation of The God Boy) and joining punk bands.

When Wilkins did pick up the pen in the 1980s, he did so with characteristic elan, so much so that today, in his late 40s, he can lay claim to an extensive literary output, including six novels, two short story collections, a book of poetry, a play, editing a Montana Award winning anthology, writing several episodes of hit television series The Insider's Guide to Happiness, and teaching the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University.

Along the way he has won the 1991 Heinemann Reed Fiction Award, the 1994 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and been awarded the 2000 University of Victoria Writing Fellowship. Still, the sense of discovery in writing remains. Take the plot of Somebody Loves Us All. It's about speech therapist Paddy Thompson's exploits with various problem clients, his sudden passion for cycling and turmoil over his mother Teresa's strange speech impediment. "The act of writing the novel turned into a journey," Wilkins explains.

"To begin with, I didn't have anything specific that I wanted to work on in Menton. All I took with me was a small newspaper cutting from the Evening Post, published 10 years ago, which told of how a black South African woman had woken up one day with a thick Scottish brogue. I worried whether it had enough dramatic potential. I only found that out once I arrived in France when, literally, I had to begin writing the book from page one.