Simon Keable-Elliott will be touring New Zealand October 2025 

Simon Keable-Elliott will be visiting New Zealand in October 2025 and giving two different talks

A list of the confirmed talks is available on this website listed in the EVENTS section.

Any organistion in New Zealand interested in booking Simon or to find out more information can email him at [email protected]

Utterly immoral, WW1 chaplain Robert Keable and his scandalous novel

In this talk Simon discusses Robert Keable’s time as a chaplain during the First World War and the events that led him to write his notorious novel Simon Called Peter. He looks at the critical reception to the novel, the attempts to ban it and the book’s great success. The author’s life was truly extraordinary. As a child he was an evangelical preacher. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, became a priest, worked in Zanzibar and Basutoland as a missionary and gained a reputation as a writer of devotional books. He recruited black labourers to help with the war effort and in 1917 travelled to France as chaplain to the SANLC. Witnessing the appalling racism the men faced ‘changed him’, as well as an affair with a 19 year-old lorry driver called Jolie. He left the church and after a year as a teacher back in England he fled the country to go and live in Tahiti. On the way to Tahiti he visited Australia and New Zealand where he was welcomed as an international celebrity. In Tahiti he spent a year living in Paul Gauguin's house before building his own house on the island. He continued to write and towards the end of his life he married, and had a child with, a Tahitian princess.
Simon is Robert Keable and Jolie's grandson. He has been researching Robert Keable’s life and work for the last thirty years. After taking early retirement following 25 years as a politics teacher his first book Utterly Immoral, Robert Keable and his scandalous novel, came out in November 2022.

1920s Tahiti

In this talk Simon discusses 1920s Tahiti and the English-Speaking writers and artists who moved to live on the island at that time. He also looks at the writers and artists who helped frame the enduring image of a paradise island - including James Cook, Herman Melville and Gauguin – which led to a huge Tahiti and South Pacific craze in the early 1920s. Simon visited Tahiti in 2016 where he met and interviewed the children of some of the 1920s writers who settled on the island.