Laurence Fearnley

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards and in 2008 Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Following a PhD researching New Zealand mountaineering-writing, she co-edited, with Paul Hersey, an anthology of New Zealand mountain writing To the Mountains, in 2018.

In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago.

In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019 and won the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship in 2023.

In 2025 her novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.