Three novels and an enigma
Four award-winning
New Zealand writers will take up residencies at the Michael King Writers’
Centre next year, including one who will write a novel about the racehorse Phar
Lap.
The four writers are Anne
Kennedy from Auckland, Peter Wells from Napier, Alice Miller, who currently
lives in Vienna, and Kelly Ana Morey from Kaiwaka, who is writing about Phar
Lap. Three of the projects are novels and Peter Wells will work on a creative
non-fiction book called The Enigma of
Family.
Competition was
fierce. More than 75 writers applied for the four residencies, with nearly 150
applications in total. The chair of the selection panel, author and centre
trustee Dr Peter Simpson, said that the applications this year were of
exceptional quality and the panel was delighted with the writers who had been
selected.
“It is a very
impressive group. Some of the decisions were very difficult to make and we regretted
the need to disappoint many thoroughly
worthwhile contenders.”
Three
of the residencies are for eight weeks and one, offered in partnership with The
University of Auckland, is for six months. Last year’s University of Auckland fellow
Eleanor Catton went on to win the Man Booker Prize for her book The Luminaries.
Alice
Miller,
who is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and playwright, has been awarded the Summer
Residency to work on her new novel called The
Tower. It is about “poetry, beauty
and the occult”, interweaving two stories, one about a contemporary New Zealand
would-be opera writer and the other about ‘George’ Yeats, the wife of W.B.
Yeats.
Miller’s poetry collection, The Limits, will be published in March
2014 in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Since 2008 she has received the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award
for short fiction, the Landfall essay
prize, and the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize. She attended the
International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington and the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow. She was a visiting writer in
Antarctica in 2011. In 2012, her first play, Native Affairs, was workshopped and performed as part of Auckland
Theatre Company’s Next Stage programme.
Author
and film director Peter Wells has
won numerous awards for his writing and film work. He is awarded the Autumn Residency
to work on an illustrated, creative non-fiction book called The Enigma of Family, which uses a
series of family letters to open up the Pandora’s box of the past and explores
how history can be revealed through the lives of ordinary people.
Wells’
first book, Dangerous Desires, won the
Reed Fiction Award, the NZ Book Award, and PEN Best New Book in Prose. His
memoir won the Montana NZ Book Award for Biography, and his biography about
William Colenso, The Hungry Heart, was
a finalist in the NZ Post Book Awards in 2011. He is co-founder of the Auckland
Writers and Readers Festival. In 1999 he was chosen as New Zealander of the
Year by North & South magazine
and in 2006 he was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services
to literature and film. He was awarded the Michael King Fellowship by Creative
New Zealand in 2011. Journey to a Hanging
- Carl Sylvius Volkner & Kereopa Te Rau, is to be published by Random
Penguin in May 2014.
Kelly Ana Morey, who will take up
the Maori Writer’s Residency, has written four novels, three social histories,
a memoir, poems and short stories. She won the First Book Prize at the NZ Book
Awards in 2004, received the Todd
Writer’s Bursary in 2003, the Janet Frame Literary Award for Imaginative
Fiction in 2005, and was highly commended in the BNZ Short Story Awards in 2012.
She also
won the Copyright Licensing Limited Research Grant last year to research her
novel about Phar Lap and she plans to complete the project while she holds the
residency in 2014. She believes the book, called Daylight Second, is the first New Zealand literary novel about a
racehorse. As a horse-lover all her life, she says the subject matter is in her
DNA and Phar Lap is a great story.
The
book will also examine “why this horse meant so much to people, why they made
him a Depression era hero and a national icon for both New Zealand and
Australia, and the passion and compulsion that drives people within the
industry.”
Novelist,
poet, editor and screenwriter Anne
Kennedy has been selected for the six-month University of Auckland Residency
at the Michael King Writers’ Centre to work on a new novel. Kennedy is in New
Zealand after a decade in Honolulu where she taught fiction and screen writing
at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.
Her
latest volume of poetry, The Darling
North, won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry this year. Her latest novel, The Last Days of the National Costume, has been among the top books
on the New Zealand bestseller list since its publication in July. She has
edited numerous literary journals and has several screenwriting credits.
Writers
who are selected for the three eight-week residencies receive free
accommodation at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport and a stipend of
$8,000. The University of Auckland Residency is during the University’s second
semester and brings a stipend/salary of $30,000. The 2014 residency programme
is offered thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand and the centre hopes to
offer a similar programme in 2015. Twenty-eight New Zealand writers have held
residencies at the centre since it was set up in 2005. The current writer in
residence is novelist and graphic artist Sarah Laing.
The
centre is also able to assist writers who do not qualify for its supported
residency programme. It has a second bedroom which is let at a modest rate to
visiting writers who need a quiet place to work.
For further information, please call Karren Beanland, Manager:
Ph/fax:
445 8451
Mobile:
021 496 488
Email: manager@writerscentre.org.nz
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