LP Hansen – New Zealand based author of books for both adults and children
My storytelling banner carries the phrase, ‘LP Hansen, using words as a peaceful form of magic’. Not to say that my words are soporific. In fact, I very much wish my stories to galvanise readers into feeling what it would be like to – outwit profiteers, restore stolen women, rescue endangered orangutans, release both tongue-tied children and factory-farmed cows – not solely for the satisfaction, but also for the energy. Because I’ve found there’s magical energy in finding what moves and touches me deeply.
In a way, that’s the journey my characters are on, through courage and hardship to eventually ‘discover a country in which they are not strangers, whose language they speak by instinct, whose habits and customs fit them like their own skin’, as Phillip Pullman says. It can be a bleak and bumpy journey but the joyful recognition on arrival needs no textbook to explain it. Although that ‘country’ changes as we grow, the energy of waking up to what’s been asleep in me doesn’t differ.
All that we know of human nature, including perceiving the human origins of goodness and evil, is found in the world’s stories. They offer reminders of our connection with nature and the world around us. Stories beguile and enchant, take us to places we’ve never been – yet know at once.
Perhaps that’s why I write, read a lot and somewhat randomly, then write some more. More about LP Hansen here.
Books by LP Hansen
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