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Jane Westaway's young adult short story collection, Reliable Friendly Girls (Longacre Press), won Best First Book Award at the 1997 NZ Post Children's Book Awards, and was short-listed for that year's Library and Information Association's Esther Glen Award. Love and Other Excuses, a young adult novel published by Longacre Press in May 1999, was written with the help of a Children's Author's Bursary. This novel was a finalist in the 2000 NZ Post Children's Book Awards. Her children's stories have also been published by Learning Media in School Journals and Choices.
Jane is a co-editor and contributor to It Looks Better On You: New Zealand Women Writers on their Friendships, published by Longacre Press in 2003. Her first adult novel, Good at Geography, was published by Penguin early 2000, and she has also begun work on a second. Her adult short stories have been published in anthologies, in Sport and Metro, and broadcast by Radio New Zealand. Jane regularly reviews for Kim Hill (Radio NZ), The Dominion and the Evening Post. Her reviews have also appeared in the NZ Herald and New Zealand Books. Her journalism has been published in NZ Woman's Weekly, NZ Listener, Consumer, Defence Quarterly, NZ Author and elsewhere. She co-authored Where to Now? New Zealand in the 1990s, published by the NZ Planning Council.
Jane came to New Zealand from England with her parents in 1964, and apart from time off back in London and California, has lived here ever since. She married young and divorced when slightly older. She has two children, to whom her young adult books are dedicated, and who are both grown up and overseas. Until she began writing seriously in the late 1980s, she tried social work, shearing shed work, domestic work, clerical work, publicity work and most enjoyably of all, journalism. She spent three years working for the NZ Woman's Weekly.
She lives in Wellington and earns a living writing and editing for government departments and corporates. She has been vice-president of the NZ Society of Authors, twice chair of the Wellington branch and is still a keen member. She is a director of Copyright Licensing Ltd, which distributes fees for photocopying from books to their authors and publishers, and is a member of the NZ Book Council and the Wellington Children's Book Association. Currently Jane is co-editor of New Zealand Books.
Accusation: A Wife's Story (with Mary Fielding)
It Looks Better On You: New Zealand Women
Writers on their Friendships.
Love and
Other Excuses
Reliable Friendly Girls