Laura Solomon (NZ)



Laura Solomon (born 1974) is a New Zealand novelist, playwright and poet. Best known as a novelist, her poetry and short stories have also been widely published and short listed for awards and prizes.

Life
Solomon was born in Auckland on 28 June 1974. She grew up in various parts of New Zealand and Australia, including Raetihi, Nelson and Tasmania.

She graduated from Nayland College, Nelson, in 1991 and later attended the University of Otago in Dunedin where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and wrote her first novel Black Light.

She moved to Wellington in 1996 to do her Honours in English at Victoria University of Wellington. and to write her second novel Nothing Lasting.

After graduating from Victoria, Solomon left New Zealand and lived abroad in London, where she wrote An Imitation of Life and Alternative Medicine. Solomon completed an MSc in Computer Science at Birkbeck College at the University of London in 2003.

She has travelled internationally for her work in IT, including working in Norway for FAST Search and Transfer, now owned by Microsoft.

She returned to New Zealand to live in Nelson in 2007 and currently resides there where she writes full-time.

Literary output
Solomon wrote poetry and fiction from her teens. As a young woman in Wellington, she wrote for theatre. Her play The Dummy Bride was produced at the Wellington Fringe Festival in 1996.

At the age of 21, Solomon's first two novels — Black Light (1996) and Nothing Lasting (1997) — were accepted by Auckland publisher Tandem Press.

She emerged as part of a new wave of young New Zealand writers in the 1990s anthologised in Mark Pirie’s The NeXt Wave (1998). She continued writing while living overseas in the UK and had a play Sprout produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005. She took a break from publishing her work but returned to writing and book publishing in Nelson from 2007.

Her recent fiction has been published overseas in Hong Kong and Britain (Alternative Medicine [short stories] and An Imitation of Life [novel]) and her poetry has been widely published in New Zealand and internationally in magazines and online sites. She has won prizes in Bridport, Edwin Morgan, Ware Poets, Willesden Herald, Mere Literary Festival, and Essex Poetry Festival competitions.

In 2009, her novella, Instant Messages, jointly won the inaugural Proverse Prize for Fiction in Hong Kong and was short-listed for the Virginia Prize in the UK. In 2011, her debut collection of poetry In Vitro appeared from HeadworX in Wellington, New Zealand.

She has since published further fiction (Hilary and David) and has more fiction works accepted for publication by Proverse Publishing, Hong Kong, namely the two sequels to Instant Messages; The Theory of Networks and Operating Systems. Proverse have also accepted the second edition of In Vitro and a second collection of Solomon’s poetry, Freda Kahlo’s Cry along with a short story collection The Shingle Bar Taniwha and Other Stories. She has also judged the Sentinel Quarterly Short Story Competition in the UK.

Publications by Laura Solomon
Fiction Poetry
 * Black Light (North Shore City, N.Z.: Tandem Press, 1996)
 * Nothing Lasting (North Shore City, N.Z.: Tandem Press, 1997)
 * Alternative Medicine (UK: Flame Books, 2008)
 * An Imitation of Life (UK: Solidus, 2010)
 * Instant Messages (Hong Kong: Proverse Publishing, 2011)
 * Hilary and David (Hong Kong: Proverse Publishing, 2011)
 * The Theory of Networks (Hong Kong: Proverse Publishing, 2012)
 * In Vitro (Wellington: HeadworX Publishers, 2011)
 * In Vitro (Hong Kong: Proverse Publishing, 2012, 2nd edition)
 * Freda Kahlo’s Cry (Hong Kong: Proverse Publishing, 2012)