Carl ShukerCarl Shuker

Carl Shuker is a Wellington writer and the author of novels including The Lazy Boys and The Method Actors. He has reviewed contemporary fiction for the Listener, Dominion-Post, and the Spinoff, and purports to view other reviewers with disdain. Carl was born in Timaru in 1974.

The power, peril and promise of targets

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The measles crisis has thrown into sharp relief how publicising targets reached – and targets missed – can affect the healthcare all of us receive, writes Carl Shuker. The debate around healthcare targets is hot right now because of two things: 1) the very public success – and, significantly for some, failure – of the … Read more

On the blind, mulish idiocy of reviewers and the genius of Pip Adam

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An essay by Carl Shuker in response to the shoddy response of most reviewers to the new novel by Wellington writer Pip Adam. Why, he simmers, are so many New Zealand critics so lazy, so patronising, so cheerfully ignorant, and just plain wrong? The finest piece of writing in New Zealand fiction this century happened and you … Read more