Bernard Beckett
Winning the Esther Glen Award marked a concrete moment of recognition for Bernard Beckett, a New Zealand writer and teacher born in 1967.
Beckett was born in New Zealand and has worked there as both a writer and a teacher. He writes in English and holds New Zealand citizenship. Those are the anchoring facts of his career, and they place him within the country's literary and educational life without further elaboration that the available record doesn't support.
Beyond the Esther Glen Award, Beckett has also received the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. The two awards together represent more than one instance of formal recognition within New Zealand's literary awards landscape. His work in English has drawn enough attention from the country's awards bodies to result in acknowledgment on multiple occasions, which the record reflects plainly.
The combination of a writing career and a teaching career has run alongside those recognitions. Beckett's status as a New Zealand citizen, writer, and teacher, documented from 1967 onward, is what the record firmly supports. The receipt of the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards stands as the second concrete marker of institutional acknowledgment in his career, alongside the Esther Glen Award.
Quotes by Bernard Beckett
Bernard Beckett's insights on:
Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.
I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition.
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
In the end, living is defined by dying. Book- ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.
I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.
The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.