Literary critic and poet Harry Ricketts said he was writing in a genre where a young male is up against the adult world and applied it to a puritanical Protestant New Zealand context to produce something “very distinctive and at the time very original”. The God Boy later became one of New Zealand television’s earliest dramas. Suggested by the case of a 13-year-old boy who had murdered his mother, it became only the second New Zealand book to be published by Penguin as a modern classic. His first novel, The God Boy, published in 1957, won critical acclaim in New Zealand and overseas. His four years as Listener editor in the 1970s helped to expand the magazine to an unprecedented mass circulation, and he then served as executive chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation before retiring in 1986. He is best known for his classic novel The God Boy but in a wide-ranging career he achieved distinction in other spheres, notably as editor of The Listener and chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation.Ī journalist for many years, he began writing fiction in his spare time. The Wellington journalist and author Ian Cross has died aged 93. Evening Post photo from the Turnbull Library
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