Trailblazers: Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy was a world-renowned children's author.

Margaret Mahy Author 1936 – 2012

World-renowned children's author

Margaret Mahy once confessed she wanted to make imagined scenarios real and, as a child, would entertain her classmates with fantastical stories. Mahy explained she did so because, she suspected, she wanted to live a fantastic life and gradually, she realised that the way to do so was by writing stories.

A tale of a boy who imagined seeing a lion in the meadow by his home propelled Mahy's lifelong journey – her first short story was published in the Whakatane Beacon when she was 7 – more than she might have imagined.

The Lion in the Meadow was on the open page inside a glass case in a 1969 exhibition, which featured the New Zealand School Journal. Read by an editor who immediately telephoned her boss, New York publisher Helen Hoke Watts, by the end of that year Mahy was an internationally published author.

A solo mother of two daughters, Mahy didn't feel financially secure enough to start writing fulltime until 1980. Up to then, she worked by day as a librarian and, after her children were asleep, wrote stories.

Friend and biographer Tess Duder said she doubted Mahy got more than four hours' sleep a night; yet she produced hundreds of children's stories, novels for young adults and poems many of which were published around the world and translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan, Afrikaans, Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.

Mahy was recognised with numerous awards including the Hans Christian Andersen and Carnegie Medals as well as being appointed to the New Zealand Order of Merit, open to only 20 living people at one time. Mahy died in 2012, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer.