___]]> Photographs]]> Otago Daily Times]]> Otago Daily Times]]> Newspapers]]>
Alison Wong remembers her Burns tenure:
I loved my year as Burns Fellow. The Fellowship gave financial support but also encouragement and recognition at a time when I had yet to publish a book. Dunedin and Otago/Southland entered into the novel I was writing (“As the Earth Turns Silver”, above) and into poems published in my collection, “Cup” (2006). I am grateful to the many people who helped in my research whether academics or other experts in their fields, and thankful for the warmth of the welcome and enduring friendships. I have a deep affection for this intimate and beautiful city.’
Wong’s novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, won the Fiction Award at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2010.]]>
Alison Wong]]> Books]]>

Bernadette Hall recalls her time in Dunedin as Burns Fellow: ‘In 1996, my family drove me down from Christchurch to Dunedin to deliver me for the year’s Burns Fellowship…in a “bread van”, a converted campervan called “Martha”. My mother, who had died on Christmas Eve, her 85th birthday, was there too, her ashes in a green cardboard box. Our first task on entering the city was to lay my mother’s ashes to rest in the Anderson’s Bay cemetery, in the grave of my father, Jim.
I was solitary a lot of the time in 1996, in mourning, and yet also breaking into new freedoms. “Still Talking” published in 1997 was the result. Anthony Ritchie turned one of the “Tomahawk Sonnets” into a song. At the moment, my desire is to see the beautiful Stations of the Cross [Joanna Margaret Paul] painted in the Church of St Mary Star of the Sea in Port Chalmers in the 1970s…fully embraced as being among the amazing gifts that Dunedin, my hometown, has to offer
.’]]>
Bernadette Hall]]> Books]]>

Michael Noonan describes his year: ‘The Burns Fellowship provided a year of freedom to work on projects of my choosing without the pressure of deadlines or worries about where the next cheque was coming from. A special highlight was to be invited by both OUDS [Otago University Dramatic Society] and the Globe Theatre – with whom I had been active in my student days at Otago – to direct plays of my choosing. At the Globe, I directed a wonderful cast in “Words Upon The Windowpane” by W.B. Yeats. For OUDS, it was a study of the New Zealand Temperance Movement with both the Mozart and Frances Hodgkins Fellows involved. It was a year of relaxed creativity, a welcome opportunity to explore ideas for future projects.’
Noonan also worked on an adaptation for television of Bill Pearson’s Coal Flat, a novel about the West Coast Mining town of Blackball. Unfortunately, it never made it to the small screen due to cutbacks in broadcast budgets.]]>
Bill Pearson]]> Books]]>

Bill Sewell was born and grew up in Europe. His parents were academics and came to live in New Zealand in 1965. Sewell studied German at the University of Auckland, and completed his PhD thesis on the German poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929), at Otago. Sewell would later go on to lecture in the German Department in the same institution. His Burns year was spent writing poetry. Many of the poems were published in Solo Flight (1982), and Wheels Within Wheels. It is clear from these poems that the landscapes surrounding Dunedin, and the weather Sewell experienced in the city had a definite influence on his writing.]]>
Bill Sewell]]> Books]]>

By the time Brian Turner became Robert Burns Fellow in 1984, the English Department had been housed in the Arts (Burns) Building for about 15 years. Turner had an office on the third floor, with a view of Flagstaff to the northwest.
He describes his time: ‘What a boost it gave, and has continued to give to New Zealand writers and our writing in general. For me, as a writer and personally, I felt as if I came of age in the 1980s. In all sorts of ways, the ‘80s were the happiest of times for me. My partner backed and supported me wholeheartedly. Being awarded the Burns confirmed and reinforced my hopes to be seen as a versatile New Zealand writer with truly worthwhile things to offer.’
During his tenure, Turner wrote poems for Bones, the play, Fingers Up, three essays, and a ‘sequence of poems on the naturalist and explorer Richard Henry’.]]>
Brian Turner]]> Books]]>

Catherine Chidgey held the Robert Burns Fellowship for a year and a half from the start of 2005. She recalls her tenure:
I started writing my novel, “The Wish Child”, when I had the Burns. When I look at the book now, I can still remember exactly which sections were written in my quiet little office in the English Department. It was wonderful to feel so supported; I could emerge from the office and talk to people when I wanted to, but I was also given the luxury of being left alone to focus on my work. I loved Dunedin so much, I stayed there for a couple of years following the Fellowship. I still miss it.’
Chidgey went on to gain the University of Otago Wallace Residency at the Pah Homestead, for six months in 2010 to 2011, where she continued her work on The Wish Child.]]>
Catherine Chidgey]]> Books]]>

Christine Johnston remembers her time as Burns Fellow: ‘The Burns Fellowship could not have come to me at a better time. I had published my first novel “Blessed Art Thou Among Women” and had started on another. I was in the habit of writing short stories and several had been published or broadcast in the previous decade. A novel for young readers, [“The Haunting of Lara Lawson”], was about to be published [1995]. Blissfully optimistic, I enjoyed the luxury of a stipend and a pleasant room in the English Department. For that “annus mirabilis”, I am forever indebted to Charles Brasch and the Robert Burns Fellowship.’
Stories that Johnston wrote that year were among those published in The End of the Century and Other Stories.]]>
Christine Johnston]]> Books]]>

Cilla McQueen describes in her own words her tenure as Burns Fellow: ‘The Fellowship gave me carte blanche, I assumed, to stretch the bounds of the poetry I knew. In 1985, joyful collaboration with local musicians produced improvised theatre pieces such as “A Maniac at the Joystick” at Allen Hall. A solo performance, “Shocks and Ripples”, was directed by Lisa Warrington. A Fulbright Writer’s Fellowship took me to Stanford University for a month-long conversation on radio drama with Martin Esslin.
In 1986, a “Spinal Fusion Diary” linked words with drawings. “Fancy Numbers” at Marama Hall incorporated half a piano, a drama class and two performance artists, the score a series of drawings of Otago Peninsula. “Bad Bananas”, with guitarists Ali Mcdougall and Jim Taylor, enjoyed several outings. Some poems and songs from these years found a place in “Wild Sweets” (1986) and “Benzina”
.’]]>
Cilla McQueen]]> Books]]>
Cilla McQueen]]> Books]]>
Craig Cliff came to Dunedin with two books under his belt – the novel, The Mannequin Makers (2013), and the story collection, A Man Melting, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2011. During his Burns year he worked on a novel that involved two weeks research in Italy; wrote reviews, stories and essays; indulged his interest in recurrent neural networks, collaborating with Lech Szymanski from Otago’s Computer Science Faculty to develop ‘found poetry’ from Dunedin Sound lyrics; and attended a range of seminars and hui. He described his Burns tenure as ‘a blessing’. Cliff currently lives in Wellington where he is putting the finishing touches on his next novel and working for the Ministry of Education.]]>
Craig Cliff]]> Books]]>

David Eggleton is diverse in his literary pursuits – he writes poetry and short fiction, is an award-winning reviewer, was editor of Landfall from 2010 to 2017, and this year he takes up the Fulbright Pacific Writer's Residency at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. This list certainly reflects only a small percentage of his many accomplishments.
He describes his Burns tenure as follows: ‘[I] wrote poems [“Empty Orchestra”], stories and essays as well as contributing reviews and articles to a variety of publications. Committed to poetry in performance, [I] also gave a large number of readings in a range of venues, and worked on recording a CD collaboration of …poetry set to music by a number of Otago-based musicians which was later released by the Wellington record label Jayrem Records.’]]>
David Eggleton]]> Books]]>

David Howard talks of his Burns tenure as a ‘coming-of-age’. He was buoyed by the fact that there were no expectations, no money worries, and no deadlines. He remembers the year in his own words:
I had permission to move through the formerly unresolved moments of my fantasy life, uniting them in two long dramatic poems: “The Peony Pavilion” and “The Speak House”. This was possible because I could close an office door and listen, without distraction, to the silence of the page; only then could I break that silence with lines that surprised even me.’
Three publications came out of the year: The Speak House (2014), A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie [ed.] (2015), and The Ones Who Keep Quiet (2017).]]>
David Howard]]> Books]]>
Landfall about the establishment of the Fellowship.]]> Edited by Charles Brasch]]> Periodicals]]>
Sarah Quigley shared the other half of the Burns Fellowship year with Nick Ascroft. She was a graduate of Oxford University where she had completed her thesis on the life and works of Charles Brasch, one of the founders of the Robert Burns Fellowship. The same year that Quigley arrived in Dunedin for her tenure, the embargo was lifted from all Brasch’s papers and diaries held at the Hocken Library. She soon made herself at home in the Library’s reading room to research his extensive archives. Here is Quigley’s essay, ‘Towards a Biography’, which formed part of Enduring Legacy, a publication that came out as a celebration of the embargo lifting. Quigley currently lives in Berlin.]]>
Edited by Donald Kerr]]> Books]]>

John Caselberg came to Dunedin in the 1940s to study medicine at Otago; he did not complete his degree. Around the same time, he became friends with some of the talented, artistic coterie that inhabited Dunedin in the form of James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch, and Colin McCahon. In the early 1950s, Caselberg published his first book of poems, and Brasch published some of his stories in Landfall. He wrote in several genres – plays, poetry, short stories, biography – and took up the Burns Fellowship in 1961. This enabled him to research archives at the Hocken Library that contributed to this anthology, Maori is My Name.]]>
Edited by John Caselberg]]> Books ]]>
Nurse to the Imagination: 50 Years of the Robert Burns Fellowship. In his 45 years in the English Department at Otago, Jones was first to introduce and teach several papers on New Zealand literature; he also wrote extensively on the topic. Jones’s volume has proved indispensable in the researching of this exhibition.]]> Edited by Lawrence Jones]]> Books]]>
Victor Rodger remembers his Burns year: ‘I was a virtual prose virgin until I took up the Burns. Theatre, television, film – they are disciplines I knew – but prose and I were more or less strangers until we started to make each other’s acquaintance at Otago. My first piece of short fiction – the beginning of something that I imagined would become longer – was published in “Landfall” under the title “Skip to the End”. The following year it was re-christened “Like Shinderella” and is included in the acclaimed Maori/Pacifica anthology, “Black Marks on the White Page”. Right towards the end of my residency I began to sketch out potential short stories for a future collection. That initial idea has grown into, Warmish Pacific Greetings, a collection of short stories which deal with two of my favourite topics: sex and race.’]]>
Edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti]]> Books]]>

For Elspeth Sandys, her Burns year meant a return to her hometown. She relished visiting old haunts, and Friday morning teas in the English Department. Accommodation was Roger Hall’s York Place house, and she became fit traipsing back and forth up the hill and back to her office in the University.
In her own words: ‘“Enemy Territory”, the novel I worked on while I was the Fellow, was published in 1997. It marked a high point for me as a novelist. There would be a long gap before I published another novel.
My husband, Maurice Shadbolt, came with me to Dunedin but sadly didn’t find it as compatible as I did so left half way through. This was a personal blow, which I now see was a sign of where things were headed in the future. One of the long term consequences of that year has been my decision to write a memoir – “What Lies Beneath” - of growing up in Dunedin.’]]>
Elspeth Sandys]]> Books]]>

Poet, novelist, and current editor of the literary and art magazine, Landfall, Emma Neale remembers her tenure:
My year as a Burns Fellow helped me to intensify my concentration, pull together a book of poems, realise that one novel idea I had was in fact better played out as a short story; and it enabled me to write three-quarters of the first draft of a novel. Attending poetry seminars and guest lectures changed the course of several of the pieces I was working on – so having close contact with academics, critics, and graduate students who were writing new poetry themselves all helped to add intellectual and creative nutrients to the work I was doing. It was immeasurably enriching and helpful.’

The novel, Billy Bird, is one of the publications to come out of the year, as well as the poetry collection, Tender Machines (2015) and the short story, ‘The Fylgja’.]]>
Emma Neale]]> Books]]>

Fiona Farrell was on her way to Dunedin to take up residency as the Burns Fellow when the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake struck. She did a u-turn after hearing on the radio of the damage caused. A month later, after shoring up her family and Christchurch home, she headed back to Dunedin. The catastrophic event would colour her whole tenure.
Farrell wrote The Broken Book, which began as a book about walking but ‘headed off piste into chapters about walking round Christchurch in 2010 and 2011’. She wrote River Lavalle, an ecological opera about the destruction of New Zealand’s rivers; and she began work on a major project of ‘twinned volumes, the non-fiction “The Villa at the Edge of Empire”, and its accompanying novel, “Decline and Fall on Savage Street”[above right], two books placing the rebuilding of Christchurch in a political, historical and philosophical context.’]]>
Fiona Farrell]]> Books]]>

Graham Billing was born in Dunedin, educated at Otago Boys High School, and the University of Otago. By the time he took up his tenure as Robert Burns Fellow, he already had several novels, plays, and works of non-fiction under his belt. His early career as a seafarer, and the time he spent in Antarctica at Scott Base, in the 1960s, proved to be enduring inspirations in his writing. Billing spent his Burns year drafting his fifth novel, The Primal Therapy of Tom Purslane. The novel was not published until 1980, as soon after the end of his Fellowship, Billing’s life ‘derailed’. He managed to get back on track at the start of the next decade but sadly never regained his former reputation as a writer]]>
Graham Billing]]> Books]]>

Hone Tuwhare was born in Northland in a bilingual home where he was able to indulge his love of reading. A boilermaker by trade, Tuwhare began to write in earnest in 1956 and published his first collection, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964 – it sold out in a matter of weeks, and was reprinted several times. Tuwhare’s tenure in 1969 was a ‘mini-Burns’, part of a Centennial commemoration of the Robert Burns Fellowship. It ran from June to October. The publication, Come Rain Hail, was the result of this tenure, his first time as Fellow at Otago. It was printed in the Bibliography Room, attached to the English Department. The cover design is by Tuwhare’s friend, Ralph Hotere.]]>
Hone Tuwhare]]> Book]]>

In 1974, Hone Tuwhare held the Burns Fellowship again, this time for a full year. He spent his tenure putting together a collection of previously published poems for Something Nothing: Poems (1974). He also wrote for a new collection, which culminated in this volume, Making a Fist of It. Throughout his career, Tuwhare toured the country, reading his poetry to audiences in his resonant and distinctive voice. He moved to Kaka Point in the Catlins in 1992, and is now remembered as one of New Zealand’s most important poets.]]>
Hone Tuwhare]]> Books]]>