Majella Cullinane was born and grew up in Ireland but has been resident in New Zealand since 2008. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from St Andrews in Scotland, and is currently researching and writing her PhD at Otago.
Cullinane recalls her Burns year: ‘During my Fellowship I worked on a historical novel, which begins in the North Island in 1890, and ends on WWI’s Western Front in 1917. This novel, “The Life of De’Ath”, will be published in October. I also worked on my second poetry collection, “Whisper of a Crow’s Wing”, which was published by Salmon Poetry Ireland and Otago University Press in May this year. I had a tremendously fruitful and productive year, and we liked Dunedin so much we stayed on.’]]>
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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.]]>
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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.’]]>
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Michele Powles is a law graduate, dancer, choreographer, and producer. After completing a Masters in Creative Writing at Auckland University in 2006, she also became an author. Powles was awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship in the year that her first novel, Weathered Bones, was published. Powles’s website explains that the novel is ‘the story of Antoinette, a widowed grandmother, Grace, an emotional young wife, and Eliza, the lighthouse keeper from another century.’ In an article published in 2010 in The Otago Daily Times, Powles stated that the recognition as a writer that came with the acceptance as Fellow was very important to her. She spent the year working on two novels and several short stories.]]>
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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.]]>
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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]]>
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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).]]>
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Kate Duignan remembers her Robert Burns Fellowship:
In Dunedin, in 2004, I was writing about Amsterdam, about two New Zealand boys camping in the Vondelpark in the 1970s, about a golden book with Marc Chagall’s paintings of “Daphnis and Chloe”. Those scenes were cut, and edited, and rearranged, but all the elements remain in the published version of “The New Ships”, which came out earlier this year.

The year I had the Fellowship, I also bought a mountain bike; I learned, from my flatmate, Simone Drichel, how to make my own muesli; and I got a large amount of dental work seen to. All of this, I’m grateful for, fourteen years on. I still ride the bike, the fillings are sound, and my kids are growing up on Simone’s muesli.’]]>
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Born in Gisborne, Witi Ihimaera began writing seriously in the 1960s, and published his first book, Pounamu Pounamu, in 1972.
He describes his Burns tenure in his own words: ‘Ah, Dun Eideann! The land of Scotitanga! Was I the only Maori in Maori Hill? I may have been. But, I was adopted by your iwi and found shelter among your people. In particular, Rakamaomao, your southern wind was kind and, blowing from the shore enabled me - following my first three books, when I needed direction - to launch my fourth, “The New Net Goes Fishing”, seaward. And so the lines taking the trailing hooks through the breakwater flowed forward into Te Ao Marama.’]]>
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When Ted Middleton moved to Dunedin for his Burns year, he made up his mind to make the city his home – ‘he likes it so much’ (Brasch, June 1970). The title-story from his publication, The Loners, was read publicly during his tenure; and the work was one of the first published by Charles Brasch and Janet Paul’s new imprint, Square and Circle, in 1972. Artist Ralph Hotere provided the artwork. Middleton’s varied career choices – dock worker, seaman, clerk, gardener, adult educator – informed his writing. He was able to feel empathy with the working class because he had lived it. Middleton continued to live in Dunedin for the rest of his life, and when he became blind in middle age, he continued to write with a Braille machine.]]>
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In her own words: ‘I remember my year as Burns Fellow with great warmth. Getting to know the city of Ōtepoti was a formative time for me – the hills, the peninsula, the coastline, the particular pathways of students in rush hour. The generosity of the English Department. Receiving the Fellowship was a huge boost of confidence, and contributed a great deal to a sense of belonging as a writer. I worked on poems, plays and stories, and the main publication that came out of my time was a second collection of short stories, “The Keys to Hell”.’
The artwork for Randerson’s work was executed by Taika Waititi.]]>
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Stuart Hoar recalls his Fellowship year: ‘What a great year it was for me. I was made very welcome by the English Department and enjoyed living in Dunedin so much that I stayed on there until the beginning of 1997. The Fellowship meant I could write full time and so I produced two stage plays, a radio play, and also started researching a novel [“The Hard Light”] that was published in 1998.
I recently was in Dunedin for a brief stay and was reminded how much I enjoyed living in the city back then, and how much I enjoyed the landscape, the great countryside walks so near to the city, the surrounding beaches and having access to Central Otago. These experiences are now part of who I am. For me the Burns Fellowship was an honour and a wonderful experience (the two don’t always go together) for which I am very grateful. Long may it continue!’]]>
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Dianne Pettis had many strings to her bow: novelist, journalist, poet, and scriptwriter. Her first novel, Like Small Bones, was published in 2004. Pettis, a Dunedinite, shared the Robert Burns Fellowship year of 2006 with Catherine Chidgey, and she described her tenure as ‘quite overwhelming and very exciting’. She spent six months, in the latter half of the year, editing her second novel, First Touch of Light; she also began work on a third. Pettis was well-known and had many friends in the Dunedin literary community, and it was incredibly sad when she passed away in 2008. Fellow Robert Burns Fellowship recipient, Sue Wootton, is Pettis’s literary executor.]]>
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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.]]>
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Paddy Richardson recalls her Burns tenure: ‘[The] year was highly significant in my development as a writer. I was astounded to be offered this opportunity, and I drew confidence from that. Best of all, though, it gave me what all writers long for: enough time, funding, and the space to work consistently on projects that I’d tried to fit within the demands of work and family.
I worked on and mainly completed “The Company of a Daughter”, and a collection of short stories, “If We Were Lebanese”. I gained a lot in terms of working out the process of writing a novel; how the first draft is always tough for me and the main object is to make it as full and comprehensive as possible, but to also push on to finish it so I have something solid to work with. The year also reminded me of how essential writing is to me, and the memory of how fulfilling it was influenced my later decision to become a full-time writer
.’]]>
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Ruth Dallas (Ruth Mumford) moved to Dunedin from Invercargill in 1954. She first met Charles Brasch in 1949, and continued to develop her professional and personal relationship with him when she worked on Landfall in the 1960s as his editorial assistant. Dallas was accepted as Burns Fellow in 1968, and had been publishing poetry for twenty years. In her own words, from Curved Horizon (1991), she outlines her writing process: ‘I found my best pattern was to mull over my plans at home in solitude in the first part of the morning, sketch a draft and take that to the Burns Room, the typewriter and the unlimited paper.’ The Children of the Bush, based on her mother’s childhood experiences, was just one of the works that resulted from Dallas’s Burns year.]]>
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In a letter dated 31st January, 1989 to then University of Otago Reference Librarian, Jeff Kirkus-Lamont, Keri Hulme recalls her time (one term: three months) as Robert Burns Fellow. During her tenure, Hulme published poems under a pseudonym in the student paper, and rewrote the ‘the bone people’. Hulme says that: ‘It wasn’t the final re-write (that took place in my garage at Okarito a year later) but it certainly cleared the mental decks for action.’
The Bone Peoplewas first published in 1984, and Hulme won the Booker (now Man Booker) Prize for her work in 1985 – a first for New Zealand. She also recalls in the letter that she wrote poetry, which would later be published in The Silences Between [Moeraki Conversations] (1982).]]>
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Michael Harlow is many things: a Jungian therapist, a poet, a librettist, and a publisher. In a report written on his Burns year, Harlow describes his tenure as ‘splendid’ and that he relished the opportunity to ‘get down to the creative business of writing’. He particularly valued ‘being an active part of the university community (and the community-at-large), where words and ideas keep flying about looking for a place to settle’.
In the report, he thanks the English Department support staff, and remarks on his enjoyment of the library as a resource centre. ‘Stop-Time: Galata Kebabci/Dunedin’ was surely inspired by his time in Dunedin as the Robert Burns Fellow.]]>
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After gaining the Robert Burns Fellowship, Maurice Duggan flew into Dunedin on 25th January, 1960; appropriately, the 201st anniversary of Robert Burns’s birthday. He described it as his ‘best writing year’, and during his tenure, he wrote or produced drafts of some of his most famous short stories. They included ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’, ‘Along Rideout Road that Summer’, and ‘The Wits of Willie Graves’ – all of which were published in this volume, Summer in the Gravel Pit, in 1965. While he was not prolific, there were thirty stories in thirty years, his style of writing made a distinct impact on traditional New Zealand literature.]]>
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Sue Wootton is a physiotherapist and acupuncturist ‘by trade’, and ‘has a particular interest in the intersection of medicine and the humanities.’ She writes fiction and poetry for children and adults, and is currently a PhD candidate at Otago. Wootton recalls her Burns tenure:
All of my publications after 2008 have their roots in my year as Burns Fellow. I used the year to read widely, to work on short fiction (which has been published variously since - in “Landfall”, as the short film “Bleat”, and in my short story collection “The Happiest Music on Earth”), and to write the poetry that was collected and published in “By Birdlight”.’ Wootton also co-edits an online magazine called ‘Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life’.]]>
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After arriving in Dunedin to take up the Burns Fellowship in January 1963, Maurice Shadbolt spent the first three months of his tenure clearing the decks of his freelance commitments. Then it was on to his ‘big book’ (eventually Strangers and Journeys). However, 20,000 words in, he gave it up. In his memoir, From the Edge of the Sky, Shadbolt says he ‘felt the need to be mischievous; to write something irreverent and unworthy’. This mischievousness became Among the Cinders (1965), his first novel, which reached 200,000 in sales. Shadbolt was a rara avis – a ‘rare breed’ – in that he was able to sustain a five-decade long, financially rewarding career solely based on his writing.]]>
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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
.’]]>
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Roger Hall expounds on his tenure as Robert Burns Fellow: ‘I was, I think, only the second playwright to get the Burns. At the time (and for many years) the University of Otago was the only university to offer arts fellowships. A privilege. The time enabled me to complete “Middle Age Spread” (which I’d been struggling with at home part-time); write my first panto “Cinderella” (“A waste of Burns Fellows’ time” one academic muttered). I got the Fellowship for a second year and wrote “State of the Play”. The Burns (and, later, generous support from the English Department) enabled me to become a full-time writer for which I’ve always been grateful. And Dunedin took the Fellows to their hearts: dinner – and other –invitations poured in. In the end, we stayed seventeen years. A great time for Dianne and me and a solid foundation for life for Pip and Simon.’]]>
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