O.E. (Osman Edward or Ted) Middleton (born 1925 in Christchurch, died in Dunedin 2010) was a New Zealand writer of short stories, described as belonging to the vernacular critical realist tradition of Frank Sargeson.[1] He was the brother of noted New Zealand novelist Ian Middleton, and like him also blind from middle age.[2] Mentored by Frank Sargeson in Auckland in the late 1950s, he moved to Dunedin to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship (1970) at the University of Otago.
Prominent New Zealand author Janet Frame once said of Middleton, "O. E. Middleton is a fine writer... He's the only NZ writer who has made me weep over a story — one called The Stone in a volume of that title."[3] Middleton was the recipient of several awards, including the Hubert Church Award and the 2006 Janet Frame Literary Award. His anthology Selected Stories, meanwhile, shared first prize for Fiction in the New Zealand Book Awards in 1976.
A full list of his publications can be found at the University of Auckland's NZ Literature File [1].
Further information can be found at the New Zealand Book Council's webpage on him [2].