https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/home daily 1.0 2023-06-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1626470659311-7P4ASKONVT98UD8RVHH4/JOHN+SUMMERS+-+WEB+-+EBONY+LAMB+PHOTOGRAPHER+2021-8+copy.jpg Home - John Summers is the author of the non-fiction collection, The Commercial Hotel, published by Victoria University Press in July 2021. His first book, The Mermaid Boy, was published by Hue & Cry Press in 2015. His writing has appeared in Sport, North & South, Landfall, Newsroom and The Spinoff. He was the winner of the 2022 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Imaginative Prose, has been a finalist in the Voyager Media Awards, and won the non-fiction category in the 2016 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards. https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/themermaidboy daily 0.75 2020-07-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1593122390253-7R2V4H2QHYDPM1KL6EX1/Cover.jpg The Mermaid Boy - The Mermaid Boy Hue & Cry Press 2015 From Christchurch to China, from mattress manufacture to Burmese medicine, these true stories explore one man's experience with the exotic and the mundane. Witty, perceptive, and often surprising, The Mermaid Boy introduces striking new ways to write about love, travel, and home. 'This book is an achievement of much clarity and grace, but more importantly it is a work of promise.' Landfall Review Online 'These strange, fetching yarns of outsiders, losers, and other average New Zealanders read like fiction, with their artful crafting of unlikely events - there's a slow boat to China, a kid in a mermaid suit, and a dildo on a doorknob in a dingy flat in Christchurch. It's non-fiction as murky realism, and its down low, observational, fun.' Steve Braunias 'The Mermaid Boy is a beautiful, robust collection of work. John Summers offers readers experiences and recollections that are somehow communal - non-fiction stories of growing up, flatting, work and travel. It is the quiet, commonplace aspect of his observation that gives this work such emotional depth. Every once in a while a book comes along that you read, re-read, and treasure. This is one of those books.' Laurence Fearnley 'He is a self-deprecating narrator with a rare empathy and tenderness for even the most hopeless people he encounters... These true stories have the shape of good fiction, making Summers a writer to watch.' Philip Matthews, Stuff.co.nz 'Strong writing, a compassionate and empathetic heart and an eye for the humorous side of our world...' Booksellers NZ 'Summers is a masterful story teller, with a prodigious way with words. An excellent winter read.' Wairarapa Midweek https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/writing daily 0.75 2024-03-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1593503012294-EJPEKCE3EJG4D29HVEQU/Rogers+St.jpg Writing https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/news daily 0.75 2022-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1626477452714-I1PGUESKHQRS3JT96QYC/Tutuwai+Hut+3.jpg News https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1626477521356-6ERR4IZKLIIEL0JLOXIO/Best+Cafe.jpg Contact - Contact John at johnsummers25[at]gmail[dot]com https://www.johnsummerswriter.com/the-commercial-hotel daily 0.75 2024-03-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ee818b5b6fe876ba457a875/1617531434170-QMGVNZ2PS5EOKXQ8YHDH/Commercial_Hotel_front+cover.jpg The Commercial Hotel - The Commercial Hotel VUP - July 2021 When John Summers moved to a small town in the Wairarapa and began to look closely at the less-celebrated aspects of local life – our club rooms, freezing works, night trains, hotel pubs, landfills – he saw something deeper. It was a story about his own life, but mostly about a place and its people. The story was about life and death in New Zealand. Combining reportage and memoir, The Commercial Hotel is a sharp-eyed, poignant yet often hilarious tour of Aotearoa: a place in which Arcoroc mugs and dog-eared political biographies are as much a part of the scenery as the hills we tramp through ill-equipped. We encounter Elvis impersonators, the eccentric French horn player and adventurer Bernard Shapiro, Norman Kirk balancing timber on his handlebars while cycling to his building site, and Summers’s grandmother: the only woman imprisoned in New Zealand for protesting World War Two. And we meet the ghosts who haunt our loneliest spaces. As he follows each of his preoccupations, Summers reveals to us a place we have never quite seen before. Judged one of 2021’s best books by Newsroom, The NZ Listener and the Academy of New Zealand Literature. ‘Clever, funny, boundlessly curious, The Commercial Hotel is a dazzling New Zealand opportunity shop, floor to ceiling with lost books and impossible treasures, railways and eels, ghosts and daydreams.’ Toby Manhire 'Meticulously researched, gorgeously written and endlessly surprising, The Commercial Hotel is a compendium of sparkling oddities.' Tom Doig, The Spinoff 'Nowhere is like anywhere else, and this collection shows us our own peculiarities from the inside, with a loving and observant eye.' Tim Upperton, NZ Listener 'As a journey through odd by-ways of New Zealand life, this is a great collection from a writer who can see the importance of things we might otherwise cast aside.' Nicholas Reid, Reid's Reader 'a pleasure to read' Jim Sullivan, Otago Daily Times ‘There is no other writer in New Zealand who can write so quietly; so much of The Commercial Hotel exists in the soft light of dawn, or twilight, due to the prose style and the tone it achieves.’ Steve Braunias, Newsroom ‘A sparkling and enduring collection.’ Tilly Lloyd, Newstalk ZB ‘I will read anything that John Summers writes. . . . Warm, enquiring, intelligent and authentic.’ Kiran Dass, Kete Books