Lydia Wevers

Wevers was born in Hengelo, Netherlands, on 19 March 1950, to Mattheus and Joyce Wevers. Her father was an architect and she had four brothers, including diplomat Maarten Wevers. The family moved to New Zealand in 1953, and Wevers became a naturalised New Zealander the following year. She grew up in Masterton and developed a love of reading as a child, saying in later life: "When I was a child, there had to be a special rule for me at Masterton public library that said I could borrow 12 books at a time instead of the usual two". She attended St Matthew's Collegiate School, where she was head girl and dux. She was the only student in her school year to attend university. She died at home on 4 September 2021, and was buried at Mākara Cemetery. ==Early career==

She obtained an undergraduate degree from Victoria University of Wellington, followed by a MPhil at St Anne's College, Oxford on a two-year Commonwealth Scholarship. On returning to New Zealand in 1973 she became a lecturer in Renaissance literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and subsequently developed expertise in New Zealand literature. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 1990, is on the history of the short story in New Zealand. In 1988 she edited Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women, which was one of the earliest anthologies of New Zealand's women's verse. Compared to a 1977 anthology edited by Riemke Ensing, it was described by The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as having a "better range of theme, consistency of achievement, and more generous space". During her early career, Wevers spent periods living in Australia and working at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney where she developed an interest in Australian literature. Together with Webby, she edited the first two anthologies of stories by Australian and New Zealand women writers: Happy Endings: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women, 1850s–1930s (1987) and Goodbye to Romance: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women 1930s–1980s (1989). In 2012 she organised and ran an ASAL conference in Wellington, which was the first and only ASAL conference held outside of Australia. was the first academic discussion of the history of New Zealand short stories. == Later career ==

From 1998 to 2001 she was appointed as a senior research associate at Victoria University, and the principal researcher for a project on the history of print culture. That research led to her historical work Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900 (2002) and a companion anthology Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology (2000). In 2004 her essay work On Reading, commissioned by Lloyd Jones, was published as part of the Montana Estates essay series. She opened the essay by saying: In 2010, she published Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, an exploration of the history of the 2000-volume Victorian library at Brancepeth Station. John McCrystal in a review for The New Zealand Herald described the book as a "little gem of a social history", in which Wevers did "a wonderful job of evoking the world of those who lived and worked at Brancepeth at the end of the 19th century". She was the director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University from 2001 to 2017. At the time Wevers was appointed a part-time director, the university had been considering the centre's closure, and it was through her efforts that the centre became an integral part of the university with additional staff members, connections with other research institutes and a broad scope of research into New Zealand society, history and culture. Together with Charlotte Macdonald she hosted a popular series of "Butcher Shop" lectures in 2017, exploring New Zealand's primary industries such as meat and dairy products. In the same year, she and Maria Bargh released New Zealand Landscape as Culture, an open-access online course on the edX platform featuring mātauranga Māori concepts, which has been described as New Zealand's first bicultural massive open online course. In September 2020 she spoke out about division in the university "brought to a head partly by Covid, and partly by this increasing and demonstrable sense the staff have that they don’t trust the senior leadership". On 28 June 2018 she delivered the Founder Lecture at the launch of the National Library's centenary celebrations on the subject of the library's history and the book collector Alexander Turnbull. She was a member of the selection panel for the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Awards in 2001, and a board member of Aratoi, Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, for eight years. She reviewed books for Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand and The New Zealand Listener, as well as for a number of other magazines, newspapers and literary journals. ==Awards and legacy==

Wevers was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours. She was an Honorary Life Member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and a Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History. In 2014, the Royal Society Te Apārangi presented Wevers with the Pou Aronui Award for distinguished service to the humanities. The selection panel described her as a "tireless and effective champion of New Zealand's literature, history, thought and culture". From April to June 2022, Victoria University hosted a series of seminars in honour of Wevers. The focus of the seminars was reading in New Zealand, and speakers included Ingrid Horrocks, Tina Makereti, Anna Fifield, Kate De Goldi, Dougal McNeill, Fergus Barrowman, and a range of other writers and literary experts. On the final night of the series, an NZ$33,000 scholarship in Wevers' name was announced, which will be awarded annually to a postgraduate student carrying out research about New Zealand. ==Selected works==

• 1984 Selected poems/Robin Hyde (editor) • 1984 Classics New Zealand Short Stories (editor, fourth edition) • 1985 ''Women's Work: Contemporary Short Stories by New Zealand Women, also published as One Whale, Singing; And Other Stories from New Zealand'' (1986) (editor, with Marion McLeod) • 2000 Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford Anthology (editor) • 2010 Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (author) == See also ==