As an emerging writer in the 1980s, Elizabeth Knox remembers discovering the work of Margaret Mahy, and the possibilities for New Zealand fiction that opened up for her when she was able to put Mahy's work alongside the work of ‘Maurice Gee and Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace and Janet Frame – my big four’. Important though these New Zealand writers were to Knox, they had ‘hammered in their boundary pegs in places that felt less hospitable to me’. It would be thirty years before Knox wrote Young Adult fantasy, but the eleven novels she published from After Z-hour in 1987 to Dreamhunter in 2006, and the five novels and collection of essays published since, have all been written from that hospitable place Margaret Mahy created for New Zealand fantasy literature.

Mahy began writing for the New Zealand School Journal before her stories were picked up by a New York publisher, and published picture books for almost two decades before writing the first of the chapter books that would open up this space for fantasy in New Zealand literature. The School Journal has been a treasure store of excellent writing for children, and Margaret Mahy, along with writers such as Joy Cowley, was an important contributor to the Ready to Read series in the 1980s. This chapter, however, takes as its focus Mahy's longer literary works for children and young adults, along with similarly substantial children's fiction by Gee, Knox, and Bernard Beckett, writers who not only participate in an international genre with sophisticated means of dissemination, reception, and commentary but also are influential writers of New Zealand literature. Because children's literature as a genre depends on the ‘shift of ground’ that Victor Watson sees as essential to the creation of a cultural space for children and adults to share, it is inevitably about place, and New Zealand children's literature offers a particular perspective on New Zealand as a place, even when it doesn't seem to be about, or even set in, New Zealand.

Until recently, for many New Zealanders the imaginative spaces opened up by children's literature came from elsewhere, creating what Mahy called an ‘imaginative displacement’.