Obituary: Nigel Cox

Nigel Cox

* Nigel Cox, novelist, bookseller. Died aged 55.

Nigel Cox, who has lost a long battle with cancer, had inclinations to be an author when he was very young. He told Marion McLeod in the Listener in 1987 that the teacher in his standard three class in Masterton asked his class what they wanted to do in life.

"I want to be an author," the youngster replied.

"Oh, don't be silly. People can't be authors - you have to do something proper," was the response. Cox said that his was the only intention in the class that the teacher baulked at. "I never gave up the idea, but at that point it became secret."

Nigel Cox spent many years discovering how hard it is to make a living writing in New Zealand. But the advertising agency he worked at soon cured him of humdrum jobs. He hated it, and after 2 years, decided the way out was to go overseas, where he hoped to meet real writers.

He saved up the money to travel by working at the Ford motor assembly plant.

Cox wrote in England but returned to New Zealand without having had a novel accepted. He got a morning job meter-reading for the Auckland Gas Company which gave him time to write short stories.

Cox's other jobs included working on the deck of a cross-Channel hovercraft, selling frozen turkeys and carrying coal.

His varied experiences were not wasted.

He told the Herald in 1990 that writing was a matter of reprocessing what had happened in his life as if it were happening to someone else

His time as a desk clerk in a "low-life" Queen St residential hotel provided the setting for Dirty Work, which, with Waiting for Einstein, he had had published by the time he won the 1991 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship.

Victoria University Press publisher Fergus Barrowman describes Cox's writing as an "extraordinary body of work".

"His ability to write an absolutely New Zealand story but invest it with this whole international mythic dimension was unique," he says.

"It will be immensely liberating for other New Zealand writers."

Cox's time in the book trade, which began in London, was also influential. He managed the Book Corner in Auckland for two years from 1979, and was co-manager of Unity Books in Wellington for seven years in the mid-1980s. He opened Unity's Auckland branch in 1989 but left bookselling in 1993 to go freelance writing.

He became a senior writer at Te Papa, the National Museum, which led to his becoming head of communication and interpretation at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2000.

Later works include Skylark Lounge (2000) and Tarzan Presley (2004).

His last work, The Cowboy Dog, was completed in the days before his death. During that time, he also attended the national book awards in Auckland, winning joint runner-up in the fiction category with Responsibility, a comic thriller set in Berlin.

Victoria University Press will publish The Cowboy Dog, which Cox had given a last read-through before his death.

Nigel Cox is survived by his wife, Susanna, and their three children.