The new award is offered by the New Zealand China
Friendship Association in partnership with the Michael King Writers’ Centre. It
inaugurates the first regular and significant literary exchange between New
Zealand and China, and is expected to include a New Zealand writer going to
China in alternate years.
The chair of the
Michael King Writers Centre, Sam Elworthy, said Ms Huo was one of China’s
rising literary stars. “She has a track record of prize-winning short stories
and the selection committee all found her prose startling, original and
compelling. We expect her to have a big future as a writer both in China and
around the world.”
The chair of the
Auckland Branch of the NZ China Friendship Society George Andrews said Ms Huo’s
was the most exciting proposal. “The fact she is only 23 augurs well for the
future. Her fellowship continues our society’s proud tradition of fostering cultural
links with China that began in the 1950s.”
Ms Huo was chosen by
a joint panel of Michael King Centre trustees and New Zealand China Friendship
Society members from a short-list of six put forward by the Chinese Writers’
Association. All applicants had to submit a writing proposal, an
excerpt of published work, and their literary CVs. Ms Huo will stay at the
Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport during the fellowship and will visit
other parts of the country.
Ms Huo’s 2013
Fellowship will be matched in 2014 by a Shanghai Writers’ Association
invitation for a New Zealand writer to visit that city. The
Fellowship is then expected to develop into a reciprocal opportunity for
Chinese and New Zealand writers to alternate with visits to each other’s
country, year by year.
The award was named
in honour of the poet, teacher, and social activist Rewi Alley, a New Zealand
sheep farmer who went to China in 1927. It is funded from the Rewi Alley
Friendship Exchange Fund set up by the Chinese Government in
2012. Alley led the movement to relocate China’s coastal industries
from Japanese destruction during World War II. He also founded the
Bailie Schools, which still exist in China’s northwest, and the co-operative
movement known as “Gung Ho” or “work together”. He died in 1987.
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