AE N
E WS
ALU
MN
MORE WELL-DESERVED
RECOGNITION FOR
DR TESSA DUDER In the recent Queen’s Birthday Honours list, author Dr Tessa Duder CNZM, OBE (Staveley, 1958) was named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to literature. This is not her first honour. In 1994, Tessa was awarded an OBE, in 2007 she received an Artists to Antarctica
Fellowship, and in 2009 she was given a University of Waikato honorary doctorate. Of her CNZM, Tessa is modest. “I know it’s cliché, but I’m grateful to all those people who will also enjoy this as a reflection on their work.” Tessa attended Diocesan for her entire schooling, except for one year when she travelled by ship with her parents to England at the age of five, returning
to Auckland in 1947. She was deputy head prefect and represented Dio in swimming and hockey. “I remember my 11 years at Dio as happy, busy and very supportive of my swimming activities,” she says. “I’ll always be grateful that the teaching at that time was strongest in the humanities. My best subjects of English, history, languages, music, choir and drama laid the groundwork for the careers and passions I later chose to follow.” Since leaving school, Tessa hasn’t stood still. Her early achievements began in the pool. She swam competitively as a teenager, winning a raft of national swimming titles and breaking records in both butterfly and medley in the mid to late 1950s. At the Cardiff Empire Games in 1958, she took home silver in the 110 yards butterfly and a fourth place with the New Zealand women’s medley relay team. The following year, Tessa was named New Zealand’s first Swimmer of the Year. Her journalism career began at the Auckland Star. She went on to work at the Daily Express in London in the mid ’60s, and then she and her husband, John, lived in Pakistan for five years with their young family. In 1977, after a brief career as a pianist with a light music trio, and with her youngest daughter now at school, Tessa began writing fiction. Her first novel, Night Race to Kawau, was published in both New Zealand and the UK in 1982. Tessa has gone on to write around 45 books. Among the most celebrated are her Alex novels about a teenage Olympic swimming hopeful. This series of four books has earned Tessa three New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year awards and three Esther Glen medals. Alex is published in five languages and has been made into a feature film. The paperback version of the book was, for a time, Penguin New Zealand’s best-selling work of fiction.
68
DIO TODAY
