Wednesday, December 19, 2012

IIML Newsletter - 19 December 2013



This is the 188th in a series of occasional newsletters from the International Institute of Modern Letters  at  Victoria University of Wellington.
This is our last letter for the year. We wish readers all the best for the holiday break, and urge you to buy someone a book! We'll be back in February.
 
1. The new Turbine is turning

Go here to check out the new Turbine. You'll find fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction as well as our regular glimpse inside the MA workshop, The Reading Room. There's also a terrifically interesting interview with this year's Writer in Residence Bernard Beckett. He's been busy. Congratulations to editors Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, M. Doyle Corcoran and Gregory Kan. All that energy!

2. Prizes
We’ve awarded a bunch of prizes in the last couple of weeks. Kerry Donovan Brown won the Adam Prize for Creative Writing (which goes to the top folio among the pagewriting MA students). You can hear an interview with him on the Arts on Sunday, Vinay Choudary won the David Carson-Parker Embassy Prize in Scriptwriting, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle has been awarded the Biggs Poetry Prize.
We also awarded $3,000 Project Scholarships to Samantha Byres, Sue Francis, Greg Kan, Adam Stewart, Andrew James and Kirsty Hamilton.
Our undergraduate workshop prizes went to:
Maurice Gee Prize in Children’s writing: Elizabeth Pennell
Story Inc Prize for Poetry: Alex Mitcalfe-Wilson
Prize for Original Composition: Hannah Zwartz

3. Congratulations
While we’re in prizes and congratulations mode, bravo to Tusi Tamasese, whose film The Orator won eight awards at the recent MOAs, including Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Director.
Congratulations, too, to Whiti Hereaka on the Bruce Mason Award, to Sarah Laing who has received the 2013 Michael King Writers’ Centre/University of Auckland Residency (she will work on a graphic novel about Katherine Mansfield), to poet and PhD student Helen Heath on her Postgraduate Research Excellence Award, and to Rachel Sawaya on winning Takahe’s 2012 Poetry Competition. Congratulations of a slightly different kind to Eirlys Hunter and Bernard Beckett on their appointment, with Lynn Freeman, as judges of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

4. Things we're looking forward to in 2013
Damien Wilkins's new novel
Mal Peet's first semester visit
Emily Perkins's arrival (she joins us from mid February)
Carl Shuker's presence as Writer in Residence (along with Anna Smaill and Lotte)
Bill Manhire's campus novel (see 7. below)
Aorewa McLeod's autobiographical novel

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