We are deeply saddened by the death of former Otago University Press publisher Wendy Harrex, who led the Press for 20 years and played a defining role in shaping it into the publishing house it is today.
Wendy was appointed as the first full-time employee of what was then University of Otago Press in 1993. She brought to the role more than two decades of publishing experience in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, including helping establish Oxford University Press’s New Zealand list and running her own publishing company, The New Women’s Press, for 11 years.
Under Wendy’s leadership, the Press developed a distinctive and ambitious list spanning history, natural history, Māori and Pacific studies, art, biography and memoir, poetry and academic scholarship. Significant publications included Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s internationally influential Decolonizing Methodologies, John Pule and Nicholas Thomas’s Hiapo: Past and present in Niuean bark cloth and the monumental undertaking The Natural History of Southern New Zealand, which quickly became a classic. Under Wendy’s oversight, the Press also published the Women’s Studies Journal, the Children’s Issues Journal, Computers in New Zealand Schools and the Bioethics Journal.
In 1995, Wendy secured the future of Landfall, New Zealand’s longest-running arts and literary journal, by bringing it into the Otago University Press fold and back to its spiritual home of Ōtepoti
Dunedin. Wendy extended the journal’s reach and importance through initiatives that still thrive as part of the Otago University Press publishing programme, including the online publication The Landfall Tauraka Review dedicated to reviewing New Zealand books, the Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize and the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
By the time Wendy retired in 2013, the Press had a substantial, respected and award-winning publishing list, with international distribution and more than 200 titles in print. We continue to build our list guided by Wendy’s vision and the impressive, solid foundation she laid.
At her retirement, Wendy reflected on the importance of university presses in ‘developing and promulgating the ideas and critical voices that help to keep us free, and preserving and growing the knowledge we need to survive as an independent, diverse, just and peaceful society’. Those words capture the principles that underpinned Wendy’s publishing career and the legacy she leaves at Otago University Press.