Pip Adam
Pip explored our relationships with architecture and engineering. Her creative project was the book-length work of fiction I’m Working on a Building.
PhD awarded 2012
Pip Adam is a Wellington fiction writer. Her first collection of short stories Everything We Hoped For was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2010 and won the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Lumiere Reader, Hue & Cry, Landfall and Blackmail Press. Her work has also appeared in publications produced in conjunction with two exhibitions at the Wellington City Art Gallery and her reviews have appeared in Metro.
In 2012, Pip received a New Zealand Arts Foundation New Generation Award. In 2013 she convened one of two short fiction workshops at the IIML.
The aim of Pip's PhD project was to explore new ways of representing our relationships with the large built forms of architecture and engineering. In order to gain a new perspective on buildings, tunnels, bridges and dams Pip is analysing a variety of texts written by structural engineers. Through this critical work she identified ways of incorporating characteristics of engineering's technical language into the creative component of her thesis, a book-length work of fiction.
I'm Working on a Building was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2013.
Pip's third book, The New Animals (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2017) won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.