Nick Ascroft recalls his tenure as Burns Fellow: ‘My six-month tenure…the best job I ever had, but also the hardest. I swanned in, and Alison Wong showed me around the office she was vacating. There was a ceremonial passing of a mug. I was there to write poems. John Dolan had helped advocate my application to the panel, the story going that he ranted my WINZ poem, “Means Testicles”, to win them around.
What I ended up working on was my novel. The back of my first poetry collection (2000) had mentioned “he is working on a novel”. These words have haunted the interceding years. Three years later, I was redrafting the first tentative chapter on the Burns office iMac. I also had the Scrabble Maven app, and that’s what 2003 represented more, my deep dive into the world of NZ competitive Scrabble. I am still in the top 20 of NZ players.’
Ascroft finished the novel. As Long as Rain, science fiction set in Southland, was published this year.]]>
Nick Ascroft]]> 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]]>

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.’]]>
Kate Duignan]]> Books]]>

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]]>

In her own words:
I was surprised to be awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship…it was one of those heart-stopping moments when I was called up and told I’d got the residency.
“Mother’s Day” was written in 2007 while I was Burns Fellow. It is the third of a trilogy. It is set in Invercargill. I was there with a friend one day, and we were driving around. It was windy and all the rubbish wheelie bins had blown into the centre of the road. Later, we drove home via Kaka Point. It was Sunday, Mother’s Day, and family groups were in the cafe eating lunch. I felt quite moved by the scene, that kids and adults had set aside this time to be together. I had grown up in a family that didn’t believe in Mother’s Day (or Father’s Day), and I didn’t go in for it either. But, it clearly meant something to the people around me, and there was a lot of love and respect in that room. So, that’s where the novel started. Rubbish bins and families
.’]]>
Laurence Fearnley]]> Books]]>

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.]]>
Ruth Pettis]]> Books]]>

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.]]>
Michael Harlow]]>

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’.]]>
Sue Wootton]]> 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]]>

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]]>

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.]]>
Michele Powles]]> 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]]>

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.’]]>
Majella Cullinane]]> Books]]>

And so, the Robert Burns Fellowship has once again been taken up. This year, the Fellow is poet Rhian Gallagher. Salt Water Creek is one of her previous publications.

In her own words: ‘The Fellowship enables spaciousness and totally recalibrates the creative life…For the first six months I have been immersed in the early history of the Seacliff Asylum, exploring the history in relation to Irish migrants. I have written poems responding to the site and the history, with other poems attempting to enact individual voices using the letter poem and the monologue. This has been a rollercoaster and has pushed my writing practice in new directions…much is in draft.
The Burns is enabling on so many levels and not least, I have been living in the place that is central to the work. I am reading a great deal of poetry and enjoying the luxury of reflective time.
People in the English & Linguistics Department have been kind and helpful and welcoming. I have tended to go into the office towards the end of the week…Writing poems seems to happen elsewhere but this has always been the case for me I think. Poems just do seem to come from elsewhere
.’]]>
Rhian Gallagher]]> Books]]>
Rhian Gallagher]]> 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]]>

Poet, Louise Wallace, has a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University, Wellington, and has been published in various international literary journals.
She remembers her tenure: ‘The Burns year was a much needed re-ignition for my work. I had become very stuck and lost all momentum while having to work full time for the few years before it. Suddenly, having so much time to read, think, and write, really opened the pathways again. The year ultimately resulted in my third collection of poems, “Bad Things”, as well as the beginning of “Starling”, an online literary journal publishing work by New Zealand writers under 25 years old - now up to its sixth issue.’]]>
Louise Wallace]]> Books]]>
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