Seresin Estate and Otago University Press are
delighted to announce the winner of the 2014 Seresin Landfall Residency.
The sixth recipient of the Seresin Landfall
Residency is Greendale, North Canterbury
based writer Sandra Arnold, who plans to use the residency to work on her fourth book, a novel titled The
Eshwell Bridge Witch Project.
‘The novel explores post-war educational philosophy,
social inequality, colour prejudice and government policies that sent poor
British children to Canada, Australia and New Zealand to work on farms and
eventually populate those countries with white British stock. It also explores
the bonds of friendship, love and connections that traverse time and place, from
17th-century England to present-day New Zealand,’ says Sandra
Arnold.
Of
her first novel, A Distraction of
Opposites, published in 1992, the Daily
Telegraph wrote, 'This book…extends and disturbs the frontiers of New
Zealand writing.' Tomorrow's Empire
followed in 2000. Arnold's fiction has appeared in journals and anthologies in
New Zealand and internationally and has been broadcast on National Radio. She
completed a MLitt in Creative Writing (High Distinction)
with Central Queensland University in 2005 and a PhD in 2010. In 2011 Canterbury
University Press published part of her thesis, Sing no Sad
Songs: Losing a Daughter to Cancer. The thesis
also included an exegesis on parental bereavement. With poet David Howard, she founded the
literary magazine Takahe in 1989 and
was its fiction editor until 1996. She is currently on the advisory board of Meniscus, a new online literary journal
published by the Australasian Association of Writing Programmes and was a guest
editor for its March, 2014 issue.
Arnold had decided to resign from teaching academic writing at
CPIT in July this year and travel overseas before returning to focus full time on her own writing. ‘The
residency is an unexpected opportunity, serendipitous in the way it fits in
with the plan I already had in place, said Arnold. ‘I am delighted – the timing
could not be more perfect.’
Former residency winners:
The inaugural Seresin
Landfall Residency recipient was C.K. Stead in 2009, with an additional residency
being made available that year to Jenna Shaw. The subsequent recipients have
been: Wystan Curnow, 2010; Serie Barford,
2011; Pat White in 2012; and Maxine Alterio in 2013.
The
Seresin Landfall Residency was established with the support of the Seresin
Estate. A cottage at Waterfall Bay in the Marlborough
Sounds is made available for the successful writer for 4 weeks. Entries
for the 2015 residency close on 31 January 2015. Application details are
available at: http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall/seresin.html
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