Jared Davidson

About

An archivist by day and author by night, Jared Davidson is a writer based in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research explores the lives of workers overlooked by traditional histories – from radicals of the early twentieth century to farmhands and convicts of the nineteenth. Jared has published five books and edited others, while his writing has featured in The Guardian, Overland Literary Journal, History Workshop, Radical Futures, Labour History and The Spinoff. He is currently the Research Librarian Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Jared’s latest book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books), won the 2024 Public Environmental History Prize, the 2024 Bert Roth Award and the 2025 WH Oliver Prize, received an International Labor History Association Honorable Mention Award, was shortlisted for the Upstart Press Award for Best Non-Illustrated Book and longlisted for the 2024 Ockham General Non-Fiction Award.

Photo by Hagen Hopkins

News

New research has begun: Farms Aflame.

Thanks to being awarded a Whiria Te Mahara New Zealand History Grant, Jared has begun researching his next book, Farms Aflame: The Secret World of Rural Arson (working title). The phenomenon of stack burning – the deliberate arson of harvested crops such as wheat, oats and barley – was common knowledge in grain-producing areas of Aotearoa during the nineteenth century. At times stack burning was almost epidemic, leading to calls for a united front of farmers to protect themselves. Yet rural incendiarism has received almost no attention from local historians. Stack burning is absent from histories of labour, rural Aotearoa, the ‘great estates’ and wheat booms of the 1870s-1900s.

A history-from-below with a dash of true crime, this narrative nonfiction illuminates the shadowy world of debt, fraud and disgruntled workers. Farms Aflame will offer a new understanding of the colonial countryside and its myths.

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