Lisa Greenwood

Greenwood was born in Westmere, Auckland. She lives in Auckland and has one daughter, born in 1977.^[2] She began writing full-time when her daughter started school in 1983, and preferred to write her novels by hand rather than using a word processor or typewriter.^[3]

Greenwood's first novel, The Roundness of Eggs, was published in 1986.^[4] It is the story of a 52-year-old woman undergoing a psychological crisis.^[2] A second edition was published in the UK by feminist publishing company The Women's Press.^[5] Journalist Pauline Willis, reviewing the novel for The Guardian, commented that it was an "auspicious start for a young New Zealand novelist, following in the tradition of Janet Frame", and observed that it was interesting that a young women should "choose to explore an older woman's problems".^[6] The Press noted that "rarely are first novels so well shaped, with language, imagery and incident all contributing to the overall form of the book".^[7]

Her second novel, Daylight Burning, was published in 1990.^[8] This book is described by the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as " a powerful and darkly bizarre account of an Auckland businessman whose yuppie life is transformed by an apparently prophetic vision of Auckland destroyed by nuclear holocaust".^[2]

In 1990, Greenwood spent time working on a novel in Menton, France as the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, which she intended to be a historical novel about women in religious life set in medieval times.^[2][3]