Ruth Park

Ruth Park was born in New Zealand, and lived a transient, working-class life for many years as a result of her father’s work as a manual laborer on road and bridge projects in northern New Zealand. Ruth doggedly pursued a serious education in spite of her family’s frequent moves, and after studying at St. Benedict’s college and Auckland University, she went on to become a contributor and editor to the children’s pages of several major New Zealand newspapers. In 1942, she moved to Australia and married another writer, D’Arcy Niland, and began publishing novels in the late 1940s—beginning with her groundbreaking debut, The Harp in the South, which unflinchingly exposed the gritty reality of life in Sydney’s poorest quarters. Park wrote several novels for adults, a series of memoirs, and an enormous number of radio plays, but at a certain point in her career began writing almost exclusively for children. Her books for young adults explore themes of longing, the difficulties of fitting in, and the journey of discovering one’s place in the world.