Book Launch: Performance by David Coventry

Join us for an evening celebration to launch David Coventry's Performance published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. The book will be launched by Tracey Slaughter.

All welcome!

About the book:
Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood.

‘Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.’ —Martha Stoddard Holmes, author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victoria Culture

About the author:
David Coventry’s first novel, The Invisible Mile, won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It was also published in the UK and Commonwealth by Picador UK, and the USA and Canada by Europa Editions. It has been translated into Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish and German.

His second novel, Dance Prone, was published in 2020. David received an MA in Creative Writing in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he was the recipient of the 2015 Todd New Writer’s Bursary from Creative New Zealand. In 2022 he completed his PhD exploring the complexities and impossibilities of living a creative life with ME/CFS – a project which was selected for the 2022 Dean’s List, and forms the basis of Performance (2024).

He was the 2022 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.