Top writers selected for residencies

Top writers selected for residencies

Two of New Zealand’s award-winning writers have been chosen for residencies at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport in early 2010.

Biographer Rachel Barrowman will hold the first of two eight-week residencies from January. Martin Edmond, a writer of non-fiction, has been awarded the second residency from mid-March.

Rachel Barrowman is a Wellington-based writer and historian. She is the author of a number of works about New Zealand cultural history, most recently Mason: the life of R.A.K. Mason, which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for biography in 2004. In 2006 she received the Creative New Zealand Michael King Fellowship for her current project, which is a biography of novelist Maurice Gee.

Martin Edmond, a freelance writer based in Sydney, has written many books and screen plays, including Chronicle of the Unsung, which won the Montana award for biography in 2006. His latest book is Zone of the Marvellous, about how the Antipodes have been viewed throughout western history. While he is at the centre he will work on The Isinglass Redaction, the story of a mysterious asylum seeker cast up on Antipodean shores.

The residencies, which are supported by Creative New Zealand, mean the two authors have free accommodation and use of the writer’s studio at the Devonport centre and each receive a stipend of $8,000.

Michael King Writers’ Centre chairman, Bob Ross, said there was strong competition for the residencies and he was delighted with the outcome.

“Both of these writers are at the top of their fields and they are producing works of major importance for New Zealand literature. “

ENDS

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