Emily Perkins

Emily Perkins explores family life and the passage of time through New Zealand fiction, short stories, plays, and screenwriting. Her first collection, Not Her Real Name, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while Novel About My Wife received major recognition in New Zealand and the United States. The Forrests follows Dorothy Forrest across decades, using selected moments rather than continuous chronology to build a family portrait shaped by siblings, friendship, marriage, parenthood, loss, and memory. The novel earned a place on the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist and forms part of Perkins’s continuing study of ordinary lives under emotional pressure. Her later novel Lioness won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Perkins has also adapted Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for the stage, written the play The Made, and co-written a screen adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal. These forms share her interest in what remains unspoken inside domestic relationships.