Peter Walker – 2011
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.
Peter began work on The Dominion newspaper in 1976 before leaving Wellington to work in Australia, then moved to the UK in 1986 to work for newspapers including The Independent and Independent on Sunday, where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the Financial Times and Granta.
Peter Walker will use his six months in Randell Cottage to work on completing a novel provisionally entitled The Watcher’s Diving, which is set in New Zealand, the US, India and Lebanon.
Florence Cadier was born in 1956 and is a journalist by profession. In 1995, inspired by her two children Bastien and Valentine, she began to write children’s stories and young adult novels. Many of her books have been translated including Qui est Laurette? (Who is Laurette?), Les miens aussi (Mine too), Ils divorcent (They are getting divorced), 24 histories pour attendre Noël (24 stories for the lead-up to Christmas) and Dessine avec Mila (Drawing with Mila). She was awarded a number of prizes, including the town of Poitiers’ historic novel award and the Literary Al Terre Ado prize, for Le rêve de Sam (Sam’s Dream). Her most recent novel is L’été des amours (Summer of loves), published in March 2011 by Oslo.
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).
Yann Apperry is a bilingual French-American who writes in both languages and translates his own texts with elegance and finesse. He is an accomplished novelist, playwright, poet and librettist. In France, he is considered one of the most talented writers of the young generation. Born in 1972, Yann published his first novel Qui Vive at the age of 25 and was immediately acclaimed by critics and awarded the “Prix Bretagne.
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).
Fariba Hachtroudi is a French writer and Iranian exile born in Tehran in 1951, and the daughter of the eminent mathematician and champion of democracy Moschen Hachtroudi. She studied art and archaeology in France, moving there when she was a teenager. Despite the distance from her homeland, the Islamic revolution in Iran left her feeling bewildered. In 1981, she decided to move to Sri Lanka where she taught at Colombo University.
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.
Olivier Bleys was born in Lyon in 1970. He holds masters’ degrees in modern literature, computer graphics and cultural project management. Author of historical novels as well as essays and travel stories, Olivier won the young novelist’s prize for The Island at the age of twenty-two. Three years later his second book, The Prince of the Fork, received a national prize. His third novel, Pastel, was translated into several foreign languages and rewarded by the French Academy.
Nicolas Kurtovitch was born in Noumea in 1955. His mother’s side of the family first settled in New Caledonia in 1843. He also has Yugoslavian origins, through his father, who left Sarajevo in 1945. After completing his schooling in New Caledonia, Nicolas travelled to New Zealand and Australia, eager to experience and absorb the diversity of the South Pacific. He then completed further study in France (Aix-en-Provence, 1977-1980), obtaining a degree in Geography before returning to New Caledonia where he took up a teaching position at Lifou.