Owen Marshall – 2015
Timaru-based writer Owen Marshall has published or edited almost thirty books, including novels, short stories and poetry including Living as a Moon, Watch of Gryphons, Carnival Sky, The Larnachs and Drybread. His 1999 novel Harlequin Rex won the 2000 Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana Book Awards. He has held fellowships at the universities of Canterbury and Otago and in Menton, France. Marshall is an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury, which awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 2002. In 2000, he became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and in 2012, a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. In 2013 Marshall was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in fiction.
Marshall used his residency to complete a contemporary novel concerning a love affair between a mature couple, one a widower, the other married, in which he will explore the power of such emotional attachments and their sometimes irrational and damaging consequences.
Marshall shared his time with Witi Ihimaera.
Witi Ihimaera is a novelist, short story writer, anthologist and librettist, was born in Gisborne. He is of Te Whanau A Kai and Ngati Porou descent with close affiliations to Te Aitanga A Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, Tūhoe, Te Whakatohea, Te Whanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Kahungunu. His works include Tangi, The Matriarch, The Whale Rider, (which was made in to a film by Niki Caro in 2002), the semi-autobiographical Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and The Parihaka Woman. A memoir, Maori Boy has just been released by Random House. Ihimaera became a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004, for services to literature.
Tina Makereti is the author of two books: a novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage 2014), and a short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia Publishers 2010), which won the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards Fiction Prize 2011. In 2009 she was the recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing (non-fiction), and in the same year received the Pikihuia Award for Best Short Story Written in English. In October 2012 Tina was Writer in Residence at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and in 2013 she was Curator-at-Large for the New Zealand Film Archive. Tina has a PhD Creative Writing from Victoria University, and teaches creative writing at Massey and Victoria Universities. She is of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Pākehā and, in all probability, Moriori descent. She usually lives on the Kāpiti Coast with her partner, daughters, unruly dog, and three bossy chickens.
Denis Welch is a poet, novelist, journalist, editor, media commentator, columnist and biographer. The Wellingtonian has also been described as a ‘serial maker of puns’.
Author, poet and playwright Vivienne Plumb was born in Australia and lived in Wellington for over thirty years before heading north in 2008. She has published four collections of poetry, two chapbooks of poetry, a novella, a novel and several playscripts, and her most recent book is poetry chapbook The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and Other New Zealand Icons (Seraph Press, 2011). Plumb’s awards include the 1993 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award for Love Knots (1994) and the Hubert Church Award for a first book of fiction for The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in her Sleep (1993).
Peter Walker works as a journalist in London, and is the author of the historical memoir The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury 2001) set in Taranaki, and a novel, The Courier’s Tale (Bloomsbury 2010), set in the court of King Henry VIII.
Patrick Valdimar White is a poet, essayist and artist whose work reflects his passion for the natural environment and an exploration of the way individuals relate to the land. His poetry collections are: Signposts (1977), Bushfall (1978), Cut Across the Grain (1980), Acts of Resistance (1985), Dark Backward (1994), Drought and Other Intimacies (1999), and Planting the Olives (2004). He has also published In Gallipoli: In search of a family story (Red Roofs, 2005).
Kirsty Gunn was brought up in Wellington and educated at Victoria University (BA Hons) and Oxford University (M.Phil). She is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Dundee and lives in Scotland and England. Gunn is best known in this country for her novel Rain (Faber 1994) which was made into a film, and for her short stories which have been published internationally including in the collection This Place You Return to is Home (Granta,1999).
Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1949 and had two poems published in the NZ Listener when she was 15. In 1972 she travelled to Sydney, Australia with her husband Matthew O’Sullivan and attended the Playwrights’ Studio at NIDA. The play she wrote for this course, Crossfire, jointly won the Newcastle Playwriting Competition in 1974 and premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney and was published by Currency Press. The play was presented by Downstage Theatre in Wellington in the late 70s.