News
On this page:
- Maxine Alterio wins Seresin Landfall Residency 2013
- Best New Zealand Poems 2012 is live
- IIML graduates honoured at Adam Play Awards
- Emily Perkins on Women's Prize for Fiction longlist
- PhD candidate Steven Toussaint wins Winter Anthology Prize
- Hannah McKie and Alice Miller shortlisted for Adam NZ Play Award
Maxine Alterio wins Seresin Landfall Residency 2013
23 April 2013
Seresin Estate and Otago University Press are delighted to announce the winner of the 2013 Seresin Landfall Residency; writer Maxine Alterio.
Maxine plans to use the Residency to work on her second collection of short stories Stories Bodies Tell, which explores 'the physical betrayal of bodies, the ramifications of something lost, and the emotional consequences that arise, not just for the protagonists, but also for those connected to them.' The title story has already been anthologised in Best New Zealand Fiction 3 edited by Fiona Kidman (Random House, 2006).
Maxine Alterio's publications include: Live News and Other Stories (Steele Roberts, 2005), Ribbons of Grace (Penguin Books, 2007) and her most recent novel, Lives We Leave Behind (Penguin Books, 2012) written during the course of doing a PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University. The PhD also included a study that focused on the memoirs of First World War nurses.
Reviewing in the Otago Daily Times, Willie Campbell described Lives We Leave Behind as ‘a finely crafted novel that gives a depth of insight into human needs and responses in times of crisis’. Alterio has also published a work of non-fiction Learning Through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using reflection and experience to improve learning (Kogan Press, UK, 2003).
'I'm very grateful to Seresin Estate and Landfall/Otago University Press for the opportunity to concentrate fully on this writing project' says Alterio. 'I envisage few distractions during my six weeks in this remote and beautiful part of the South Island … since land and seascapes often appear almost as characters in my work, I expect aspects of Waterfall Bay will find their way into my writing during my stay and possibly long after I leave.'
Read more about Maxine Alterio
Read more about the Seresin Landfall Residency
Best New Zealand Poems 2012 is live
8 April 2013
The 2012 issue of Best New Zealand Poems (www.victoria.ac.nz/bestnzpoems) been published online, and takes readers on a journey from Turangi to Greece, via Buddhism, and back to Taranaki and Cathedral Square.
The editor is New Zealand's Poet Laureate Ian Wedde, the author of 14 poetry books, as well as several novels and essay collections.
Wedde says he was drawn to an enticing element in the poems he selected—their tendency to resist and thwart. 'I want poetry to do what other kinds of writing don't, or can't—I prefer subversion to propriety.'
Many of the poems in his selection are also energised by cross-cultural influences. Murray Edmond uses the Japanese 'tanka' form; C K Stead translates the Italian poet Eugenio Montale; Albert Wendt writes of a Hawaiian mountain; and Serbian-NZ poet Aleksandra Lane channels the spirit of the inventor Nikola Tesla in a series of 'found poems'.
Series editor, poet and Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters Senior Lecturer Chris Price says: 'Best New Zealand Poems reveals that our poets are as much at home in the world as the country they live in.'
A number of the poems are also available as audio recordings. Christchurch's Frankie McMillan, teacher of creative writing at the Christchurch Polytechnic and the Hagley Writers' Institute, is among a number of poets who can be heard reading their work on the site.
Best New Zealand Poems was first published online in 2001, and features a different editor each year. In 2011 Victoria University Press published The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems, a selection from the first 10 years of the collection in book form.
Best New Zealand Poems 2012 is published with the support of Creative New Zealand, and hosted by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre at Victoria University.
For more information please contact Chris Price on (04) 463 5815 or email chris.price@vuw.ac.nz.
Visit Best New Zealand Poems online.
IIML graduates honoured at Adam Play Awards
6 April 2013
Philp Braithwaite (MA in Creative Writing, 2003) is the winner of Playmarket's 2013 Adam New Zealand Play Award, for his play The Mercy Clause. Philip is an award-winning playwright and theatre practitioner. Amongst his awards are the BBC World Service/British Council International Radio Playwriting Award 2001, the Sony Award for Radio Drama and the Massey University Cultural Award.
Hannah McKie (MA in Creative Writing, 2009 and current PhD in Creative Writing candidate) has won the Best Play by a Woman Playwright category for Mary Scott: Queen of the Backblocks. Her play will be put forward as the Play Press submission to the prestigious international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Established in 1978, the Blackburn Prize is given annually to recognise women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre.
Both Philip and Hannah were members of the MA programme's scriptwriting stream, convened by Ken Duncum.
Now in its sixth year, the Adam NZ Play Award recognises and celebrates the best in new writing for theatre. The overal winner and runner up, and three special category winners were announced by Playmarket's Director Murray Lynch at an award ceremony at Circa Theatre on 6 April.
Read more about the Adam NZ Play Award and the 2013 winners.
Emily Perkins on Women's Prize for Fiction longlist
13 March 2013
The award-winning author and IIML senior lecturer has made the longlist of the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), for her fifth novel, The Forrests.
Emily is in star-studded company, alongside Hilary Mantel and Barbara Kingsolver among others. Read the full longlist here.
The shortlist will be announced on 6 April, and the winner on 5 June.
More about the MA in Creative Writing
PhD candidate Steven Toussaint wins Winter Anthology Prize
12 March 2013
The Winter Anthology is a collection of contemporary literature informed by history and older art, 21st century science and philosophy, and the ending of print culture.
The 2012 Winter Anthology Contest, judged by Cole Swensen, was won by Steven Toussaint for selections from his long poem 'Fiddlehead': 'the sentient flies', 'and woke in a flood', and 'the sapphirous eye of transits'.
Steven, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria's International Institute of Modern Letters.
Read more about Steven and his PhD project.
Hannah McKie and Alice Miller shortlisted for Adam NZ Play Award
8 March 2013
Playmarket's Adam NZ Play Award celebrates the best in new writing for theatre.
Hannah McKie, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria and is currently a PhD candidate in our creative writing programme, has been shortlisted for 'Mary Scott: Queen of the Backblocks', which she is writing as part of her PhD thesis. The play explores a boom time in New Zealand theatre written and produced by women – the heyday of the British Drama League's one-act play festivals. Four dedicated and determined teams of women from different parts of the country – playwrights, actors and directors – rehearse new New Zealand work in a race against time, budget, sexism, philistinism, the Second World War, inter- and intra-team rivalry and a general lack of conviction that anything happens in a New Zealand woman's life worth writing about – before coming head to head in the national final. Will Ngaio Marsh win the cash prize? Has Nola Millar lost her team's return train fare on a horse? Will backblocks writer Mary Scott's move into theatre (by putting her own life story on stage) be a success? Or are all these intrepid women dramatists fated to go unrecognised and unrewarded when the boys come marching home?
Poet, essayist and fiction writer Alice Miller, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria and an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is shortlisted for her first play 'Native Affairs'. Set in Wellington in 1881, 'Native Affairs' is the story of newspaper proprietor and man-about-town Bryce Forster, whose bid to become the next Premier is stymied by his estranged wife, his own stubbornness and a new temptation who saunters into his life. Pretty, ambitious and with an eye for facts, Eliza also catches the eye of Forster's adopted son Will, who is convinced that his father's push for another military campaign against Maori will jeopardise his political career.
The full shortlist is here. The winner will be announced in early April, followed by a rehearsed reading of the winning play at Circa.
Read more about Hannah McKie and Page Left Productions