William Taylor’s literary career began in the late sixties, while he was head teacher of a small country school in Hawkes Bay. Over five years he published six adult novels in New Zealand and England; an apprenticeship, he always said, for his novels for children.
Some 13 years and four early children’s books later, he won the Choysa Bursary for children’s writers in 1986, enabling him to write full time. Despite being variously at times a school principal, mayor of Ohakune, a restaurant owner and a solo father of two boys, he produced a steady stream of books, one almost every year.
The break-through book was Possum Perkins in 1987, published in the US as Paradise Lane and still in print there. Then came such classics: Break a Leg!, The Worst Soccer Team Ever!, Making Big Bucks, I Hate My Brother Maxwell Potter, The Porter Brothers, Supermum & Spike the Dog and another, Knitwits, which continues to do well in the US.
His finest comic book, Agnes the Sheep, appeared in 1990, soon followed by the first of what he called his ‘serious’ books, Beth and Bruno, followed by The Blue Lawn, a ground-breaking and at the time controversial study of a relationship between two teenage boys and the first Kiwi YA book to be ‘stickered’ by booksellers with a warning about its graphic content.
For two decades Bill was a sought-after visitor to schools under the New Zealand Book Council’s Writers in Schools scheme. He was president of the Society of Authors for three years, later its President of Honour, and mentored writers’ groups in Taumaranui and elsewhere.
Two of his books made it to the small screen: The Worst Soccer Team Ever and Break a Leg were together serialised as All for One. The Blue Lawn was also adapted as a play in Wellington. His final years of publishing saw some light-hearted picture books, but his last YA novels, especially Jerome, Scarface and the Angel, and the tough read which he ironically titled The Land of Milk and Honey, dealt with dark themes. His last work was a well-reviewed memoir, Telling Tales: a Life in Writing, in 2010.
Bill’s novels won him international honours: Italy’s Premio Andersen, for the Italian translation of Agnes the Sheep; a six-month fellowship to the University of Iowa; invitations to international writers’ festivals in Melbourne and Chautauqua, New York State; and the inclusion of several of his novels in lists of ‘best books’ compiled annually by the American Library Association and the International Youth Library in Munich.
In 2004 he was awarded an ONZM for services to literature and the community. He died in September 2015.
