You have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir, 1956–1986

New Zealand’s most extraordinary literary everyman—poet, novelist, critic, activist. C. K. Stead told the story of his first twenty-three years in South-West of Eden . In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three.

It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries, and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s. And, at its heart, it is an account of a remarkable life among books—of writing and reading, critics and authors, students and professors.

From Booloominbah to Menton, The New Poetic to All Visitors Ashore , from Vietnam to the Springbok Tour, C. K. Stead’s You Have a Lot to Lose takes readers on a remarkable voyage through New Zealand’s intellectual and cultural history.

Please note this copy is in near new condition with a small neat inscription on an inside page.

ISBN: 9781869409128

Size: Hardcover, 440 pages

Publisher: Auckland University Press

Published: 2020