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Gordon Ogilvie (1934 - )
Gordon Ogilvie has a deserved reputation as a biographer and historian with a special affection for the Port Hills and Banks Peninsula as well as early Canterbury. He grew up in the Horotane Valley ('a Huck Finn paradise') and his early interest in the hills developed into research and eventually the publication of three books, two of which won J.M. Sherrard awards for regional history: The Port Hills of Christchurch and Banks Peninsula: Cradle of Canterbury. His Pioneers of the Plains: the Deans of Canterbury (1996) has also been highly commended.
But it is as a biographer that he has made a national mark. The Riddle of Richard Pearse (1973), a finalist in the Wattie award, was a searching investigation into the life of the pioneering South Canterbury aviator thought to have flown in a heavier than air machine at Waitohi before the Wright brothers. He found the claim could not be proved (nor disproved); but the book, reprinted twice, has been the source of TV documentary-dramas, three plays, a radio drama and a poetry sequence.
Denis Glover: A Life, a major publishing event in 1999, has been described as a masterly achievement which has carried literary biography to a new plane in New Zealand. It reveals the poet as quite inseparable from his troubled, tangled and chaotic life as were Burns, Byron or Baxter. It too was a finalist in the Montana award for 1999.
Gordon Ogilvie was educated at Canterbury and Victoria Universities, from which he graduated M.A. in English. After various appointments he became Head of English at St Andrews College, retiring in 1993 to write fulltime. He has been a prolific freelance journalist, contributor to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and active member of the Historic Places Trust.
Sources
The Christchurch Writer’s Walkway, E. Beardsley, Canterbury Branch, New Zealand Society of Authors, 1999.
