Our 2014 writer-in-residence, Tina Makereti, has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.
The announcement was made in Wellington on 10 September by the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship Committee in conjunction with The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi and Craig Investment Partners.
Tina will head to France in early 2027.
As we move past the shortest day of the year and look optimistically towards Spring and Summer, here are two dates for your calendars:
Sunday 25 October from 1 to 4 pm: Annual Open Day at Randell Cottage, 14 St Mary Street, as part of the Wellington Heritage Festival.
Come along on the Sunday of Labour Weekend to visit the Cottage, enjoy delicious home-made afternoon teas under the garden gazebo and listen to a full programme of readings by our current writer-in-residence and other authors and poets. Relax in our pretty garden and hope to win a parcel of books in our raffles.
You can also join the Creative and Historic Cottages Walk around Thorndon. Make a day of it and see the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden in the morning, stop in one of the local cafes for a snack and then make your way to Randell Cottage, Rita Angus Cottage and Lilburn House during the afternoon.
Wednesday 25 November 6-7 pm with light refreshments from 5.30: Randell Cottage Writers Evening in the Archives Library NZ auditorium
This is your chance to hear from our exciting new writer, essa may ranapiri, who is living in Randell Cottage with their family from July to December.
We’ll also share the two latest videos, made as permanent records of the style, aspirations and experiences of our recent French and New Zealand residents.
More to come closer to the time!
We love to celebrate the works of Randell Cottage alumni. Just launched is NOVA, a novel by Tim Corballis, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Author of the celebrated novel Amma, Saraid de Silva has spent a six-month residency at Randell Cottage working on her much-anticipated second work. In this new video she reflects on her personal style, the working environment of the Cottage and the value of a dedicated, uninterrupted time for creative writing.
We acknowledge the many generous supporters whose contributions to our Boosted campaign made it possible to fund Saraid’s residency and help to maintain our heritage building.
Saraid’s video is one of a series commissioned by the Trust to provide a permanent oral history record of our writers towards the end of their residency, capturing their experiences and aspirations at that moment in time. They are available on our website and are also held by arrangement by the Turnbull Library.
Watch Saraid’s interview
Congratulations to Tina Makereti, Randell Cottage Fellow in 2014, who has won the Ockhams General Non-Fiction award for This Compulsion in Us (published by Te Herenga Waka University Press).
Our writer-in-residence in 2021, Lynn Davidson, has since settled in Edinburgh, where she is teaching and continuing the family research on which part of her writings has been based.
Congratulations to Randell Cottage Trustee and past writer in residence, James Norcliffe, on the launch of his latest poetry collection.
March is Francophonie month at the Alliance Française in Wellington. The Randell Cottage resident writer, Katia Astafieff, helped launch the celebratory month when she featured at a full-house event on 6 March, in conversation with the French Embassy’s Noémie Clarke.
Immerse yourself in literature this March for Le Mois de la Francophonie, a month-long celebration of French-speaking culture!
Join us for a captivating evening celebrating Francophonie with a special talk by Katia Astafieff, the new resident writer at Randell Cottage.
“For her special project during the residency, Katia plans to explore the story of Marianne North, an Englishwoman who travelled to Australia and New Zealand in 1880 on the advice of Charles Darwin, and painted remarkable illustrations of indigenous flora.”
This event offers a rare opportunity to hear about the author’s project.
Alliance Française Wellington – French Cultural Centre
Level 3, 78 Victoria Street, Wellington
📅 6pm, Friday, 6 March 2026
🎟 free entry – but registration required
🗨️ In French
A must-attend for literature lovers and those curious about the diverse expressions of the French-speaking world!
Randell Cottage welcomes its newest resident, traveller and writer, Katia Astafieff.
Katia loves popularising science, especially botany. She also has a particular interest in the great explorers and has brought these two topics together in her book L’Aventure extraordinaire des plantes voyageuses, (The Extraordinary Adventure of the Travelling Plants, Dunod, 2018), in which she tells the story of eleven plants and eleven explorers.
Her most recent book, Par les chemins des Indes: Sur les traces du botaniste français qui aurait pu devenir vice-roi du Cachemire (Along Indian Routes: In the Footsteps of the French Botanist Who Could Have Become Vice-Roy of Kashmir) traced the story of Victor Jacquemont’s botanical travels in the 1840s.
You can read an extract here, translated for us by Trustee Jean Anderson, with permission from Katia’s publishers.
After writing about male explorers, Katia says she began to be interested in the women botanists who had similarly travelled to distant lands to discover new species.
Accordingly, while based at Randell Cottage, Katia aims to take inspiration from the life of Englishwoman Marianne North, a natural history illustrator, whom Charles Darwin encouraged to travel to New Zealand in 1880. She envisages ‘a kind of fictionalised biography’ that will develop from research, paintings, observations of the living environment, meetings with people, thirst for knowledge, art and adventure. Katia says, “Marianne North’s special approach was to show plants in their natural environment, including background landscapes, which gives her work an ecological dimension, since she shows the interactions between the species and their environments. Her work lies on the border between art and science.”
