Christine Hayvice is a New Zealander who has lived in Canada for many years, but she returns to the place of her birth regularly. She has been a visiting writer at the Michael King Writers’ Centre several times, most recently in early 2015.
She was born in Hawera in 1949. She began writing as a child with stories and poems published in the Pixie Pages of the New Zealand Women’s Weekly. She has lived in Canada for forty years, where she has been a social activist, editor and journalist. Her day job for 32 years was with an international airline where she was also a trade union representative and used her travel benefits to return to New Zealand each year. She was a member of the performance group the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union and the feminist writers and artist group Sex, Death and Madness.
Since 2008 she has been researching and writing a history of her family, Russian Jewish immigrants, who arrived in Wellington in 1910 and set up secondhand shops and tailoring businesses. She is now retired and lives several months of each year in New Zealand.
In 2012 she completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where she began work on a collection of short stories based on family tales. These stories include dead bodies, a love affair, racetrack shenanigans and a suicide, set in and around Wellington.