Famed Kiwi author Peter Wells dies
Novelist, playwright, filmmaker, historian and gay pioneer Peter Wells, MNZM, has died.
Wells’ close friend of more than two decades, David Herkt, said Wells died in Auckland yesterday afternoon. He was 69, and surrounded by close friends and his husband, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins. ‘‘[He] basically changed everything in the field in New Zealand writing because he opened it up to so many different voices,’’ Herkt said.
‘‘Before Peter, people who were gay and lesbian really did not have a voice – a literary voice.
‘‘[He] opened that whole field up to gay, lesbian and transgender New Zealanders. His work covered a whole lot of fields, you had movies, you had short stories, you had novels and you had non-fiction.
‘‘Very few New Zealand writers have had that breadth of work, and his work not only concentrated on and focussed on people’s sexuality, but also in the area of race relations and New Zealand culture,’’ Herkt said.
‘‘He showed us things about our past that perhaps we don’t think about as much as we should . . . Peter opened up a whole history of racial relations in New Zealand in his last books that we don’t think about.’’
His final book, Hello Darkness, was ‘‘world class’’, Herkt said. ‘‘A man takes you right up nearly to the final moments of his life and he uses a new form, something that we all use every day, most of us – Facebook.
‘‘What he was doing was putting messages from his days about his life, posted them on Facebook and used them to construct a book which has just been written. He really did go to new places and he took us to and showed us things about ourselves that we did not know.’’
Wells’ prostate cancer had metastasised and was in his bones. In 2006 he was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to literature and film.