Bio
David Coventry is an award winning novelist, born in Wellington, New Zealand . A former sound engineer and film archivist, David is the author of the The Invisible Mile (2015), the 2016 winner of the Hubert Church Award for Fiction, Dance Prone (2020) and Performance (2024). He lives in Diamond Harbour amongst the trees.
Coventry has PhD and a Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters (2010). In 2001 he completed an Honours degree in English Literature (VUW). His PhD was awarded a place on Victoria’s prestigious Dean’s List in 2022.
His first novel, The Invisible Mile (2015) re-imagines the 1928 Tour de France. The novel is published in New Zealand by Victoria University Press, in the UK and Commonwealth (ex Can) by Picador UK, and the USA and Canada by Europa Editions. The novel has been translated into Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish and German.
The Invisible Mile was in the New Zealand top ten for over a year and was shortlisted in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The novel was awarded the 2016 Hubert Church Award for Best First Book. David was the 2015 recipient of the Todd New Writer’s Bursary administered by Creative New Zealand and is the 2022 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at Canterbury University where he completed Performance and worked on a fourth novel.
His second novel Dance Prone examines the effects of trauma and its resulting language on memory and self through the eyes and deeds of post-hardcore punk group, Neues Bauen. The novel immediately received the highest praise on release with reviews announcing ‘Coventry’s work as some of the finest in recent NZ literature’ and that Dance Prone was ‘a proclamation of Coventry’s literary powers, a transcendental quest through the mind, body and through landscape, and a raw and raging celebration of music.… Astounding.‘
Performance, somewhat experimental in scope, utilises life-transcription, fiction, essay and narrative manipulation/trickery to map Coventry’s last few decades, a time spent living with ME/CFS (a systemic disease that affects all parts of the body and particularly (for himself) cognitive functionality and energy production). It was published in June 2024 and quickly racked up effusive reviews. It has been described as a ‘masterpiece of narrative disintegration’, compared with the work of Thomas Bernhard and Virginia Woolf and posited as ‘an act of creative transcendence, transcendence of illness, of an impaired state, of the limitations of the body, of the rules of linear storytelling.’ It was stated in North and South magazine that ‘[t]hrough art and attention, Coventry offers a way to live when living seems impossible.’