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.