Godfrey Sweven

Godfrey Sweven was the pen name of John Macmillan Brown (1845–1935), a Scottish-born scholar who emigrated to New Zealand in 1874 as one of the founding professors of Canterbury College in Christchurch, where he taught English and classics and later became chancellor of the University of New Zealand. Under his pseudonym he published two utopian novels, Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles in 1901 and Limanora, the Island of Progress in 1903, which describe a Pacific civilization perfected by thousands of years of deliberate self-improvement. He also wrote on Polynesian anthropology and Maori origins. His daughter Millicent Baxter was the mother of the poet James K. Baxter.