Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a prolific novelist, a short story writer, essayist and historian. He won a Copyright Licensing Limited scholarship to write Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The New Zealand Gold Rushes, which was published in 2008.
Visit Stevan Eldred-Grigg's website
BOOKS
Shanghai Boy
Manfred Morse has just hit fifty, and also the wall. Life seems empty. His marriage is long since over, his leathery old father is in his tenth year of dying of cancer, while his colleagues play games of petty politics. Seeking stress leave from his New Zealand university, he takes a job as guest lecturer at a university in Shanghai. Here he suddenly comes face-to-face with raw passion, but in the shape of one his students, aged only eighteen. He ducks this way and that, 
fending off love and, when he can no longer hold out, he lashes out. The young student goes missing. The police come knocking on Manfred's door. Who is the killer? Manfred? Or is he a victim? As the story slips back and forth between the southern and northern hemispheres, Shanghai increasingly takes centre stage: a pulsing city of crowded streets and clouding smog; motley smells and mindless noise; a complex and contradictory place that leaves Manfred both horrified and aroused. This is a clever and compelling novel from a prize-winning author.
Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The New Zealand Gold Rushes
This is a first - a thorough and carefully researched history of the gold rushes in New Zealand - and it establishes a benchmark for future work on the history of the gold rushes. It's based on sound scholarship and aimed at the wide and growing general readership of those keen to know more about, and to weigh up, the history of New Zealand. The style is clear, clean and lively. The scope is the social history of the goldfields of colonial New Zealand, from the 1850s to the 1870s. The book opens with a survey of worldwide rushes in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, when for the first time in history a great wheeling movement of gold diggers began to revolve from continent to continent. The main body of the book looks at all the rushes, large and small, that took place in the colony: Coromandel, Golden Bay, Otago, Marlborough, the West Coast and Thames. The early chapters of the main body survey rushes chronologically; the later chapters look at rushes thematically. Beautifully illustrated with sketches and watercolours of the times, this is both a wonderful read and a beautiful gift book.