Paul Campbell

Find Paul’s book at Oxford eBooks on
table number 8
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

After 18 million written words – a conservative estimate after six decades as a writer – it is hard to pinpoint an aspiration, a guiding philosophy, for what I do. In effect I am a professional historian, my discipline simply recording events witnessed since choosing journalism as a career in 1963 and progressing through newspapers, wire services, radio, television and magazines in a dozen countries.

Politics, conflicts, triumph and tragedy, the human story has coloured my personal canvas and these events by necessity have been the ingredients of my literary casserole.

While I am the author of 15 books, these are predominately historical records of people, families, and environments as well as the building blocks of the New Zealand saga.

Thus, my debut novel of 2015, City of Storms, written from my modern-day refuge from the wider world, my home overlooking that blue waters of the Southern Hemishere’s largest water haven, the Kaipara Harbour, relies heavily on professional experience in the Philippines and the Far East, wild imagination filling in the gaps between historical fact.

My new autobiographic offering, Hot Metal, Cold Beer – Farewell the Fourth Estate, speaks to those years of great adventure even as I pen a second instalment of memoir tracing a lifetime battle with poliomyelitis

I have been fortunate in a life choice which opened up myriad adventures and travel, plus human experience, against a kaleidoscope of news events. Writing about these has become second nature. I always maintained that my continuing journalism for various media outlets got in the way of other writing. Does a house painter come home to paint his own home?

But writing City of Storms and Hot Metal, Cold Beer has shown me another way to represent in words the impact on me of so many years’ involvement in framing the first draft of history.

Paul Campbell
Kaipara Harbour
New Zealand