Paula Boock was born and educated in Dunedin; she is a graduate of the University of Otago. Before her tenure as Burns Fellow, she had four published works, including Dare, Truth, or Promise (1997), which won the NZ Post Children’s Book of the Year Award in 1998. During her tenure, Boock worked on a novel with the provisional title of ‘Boydi’, a work for adults set in Dunedin. Boock is also an accomplished scriptwriter: she has worked on The Insider’s Guide to Happiness (2004), The Insider’s Guide to Love (2005), Bro’Town (2004-09), and Burying Brian (2008).
Power and Chaos, is ‘an adaptation of the cult television series’, The Tribe. Boock continues to write and produce scripts through her company Lippy Pictures.]]>
Paula Boock]]> Books]]>

Although he was born in Christchurch, Peter Olds has been living in Dunedin since the mid-1960s. He met James K. Baxter in the city, and the older poet influenced him and his work, as did other former Burns Fellows, such as Hone Tuwhare and Janet Frame. Olds was first published in 1972, when Lady Moss Revived came out of Caveman Press; Lawrence Jones, in Nurse to the Imagination, describes him as ‘an anti-elitist poet of the youth culture’. Olds’s tenure as Burns Fellow in 1978 was a one-term stint, and some of the poems included in Beethoven’s Guitar were written during his time at Otago. Olds has been described in recent years as a ‘living legend’; he continues to live and work in the city.]]>
Peter Olds]]> Books]]>

Philip Temple writes both fiction and non-fiction. Most of his earlier works have a distinct ‘outdoors’ flavour: books on mountains, exploration, New Zealand landscapes, and the environment. These reflected his own personal pursuits and experiences in mountaineering and adventuring.
In his own words, he describes his year as Fellow: ‘While I held the Burns in 1980 I completed revision of “Beak of the Moon”, and undertook a great deal of research for another novel…my tenure of the Burns allowed me to apply for the higher degree of Doctor of Literature…which was awarded after examination of my work to 2004.’
Temple also began planning New Zealand Explorers in his Burns year. He returned to live in Dunedin in 1990.]]>
Philip Temple]]> Books]]>

In the early 1960s, Ronald Allison Kells Mason (1905-71) was struggling both physically and mentally, with pneumonia and depression. His award as Robert Burns Fellow for 1962 served as a great fillip for him, and he described it as a ‘reprieve from death’. Before his tenure, Mason had not published anything for 21 years. During the year, he intended to write short stories and undertake research for a Rewi Alley biography, but his focus became publishing previously written poems. Collected Poems came out in July of that year. Later that month he was hospitalised with depression. He recovered, with medication, and continued with his Burns year. The love and gratitude Mason had for Dunedin and its ‘Scottishness’ saw him remain in the city for three more years.]]>
R. A. K. Mason]]> Books]]>

Among other things, Rawiri Paratene wrote a draft of his drama, Erua; worked on the teleplay, Dead Certs; performed his poems in venues around Dunedin; and completed a series of lectures called ‘Constantly in Pursuit of Joy’. He enjoyed having an office where he would work at all hours of the day and night – he even named it – ‘Zong’.
Paratene describes his time as Burns Fellow: ‘I confess that, at the time of writing, my application was probably the best thing I’d written at that stage. It was certainly imaginative, claiming I had completed a radio play tackling the dilemma of conservation, called “Save Us a Place to Live” – I hadn’t. So when I got a response that I was on the short list and that they were interested in the radio script…I quickly (overnight) drafted the play…[it] wasn’t bad. I completed the script in my tenure…The Fellowship was a fruitful and important part of my development as a dramatist.’]]>
Rawiri Paratene and Ian Mune]]> Newspapers]]>

Renée describes her tenure: ‘Only the second time I’d been to Dunedin...The university environment seemed alien at first but became less so as the year moved on. Or, maybe I cared less. I worked on a play, “Jeannie Once”, which, a year or so later, had its first performance at Fortune Theatre, and my first novel, “Willy Nilly” (1990), was launched in the Staff bar one Friday night.
Although I felt out of my depth, I enjoyed Friday afternoons during the winter term when some third year students came to discuss their work. I am certain I was no help to them but they entertained and amused me. My enduring memory is of the friends I made and the fun we had and the way no-one in Dunedin is surprised or puzzled or disapproving when you say in answer to the question, ‘What do you do?’, ‘I’m a writer’…a very important year for me in all sorts of ways, both professional and personal. I grew to love the city, the South, and of course not having to worry about money for that year was a real boon
.’]]>
Renée]]> 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]]>
In a letter from Robert Lord to Jeff Kirkus-Lamont, dated 4th February, 1989, Lord recalled his tenure as Fellow. He listed his activities as follows: The play, The Affair, was completed and performed in Dunedin, Wellington, and Palmerston North; China Wars, a play, occupied much of Lord’s time and was performed in Wellington, Christchurch, and at time of writing, was being rehearsed in New York; a radio play, The Body in the Park, was completed and purchased by Radio New Zealand; the play, Bert and Maisy, was recorded, broadcast, and subsequently published; Country Cops, was revised, published in New York in 1989, and staged in Vermont the same year; and also he organised a Dunedin Playwrights Workshop at the Globe Theatre. A busy year for someone whose intention was to escape the ‘rat race’ of New York.]]>
Robert Lord]]> Books]]>

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.’]]>
Roger Hall]]> Books]]>

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.]]>
Ruth Dallas]]> 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]]>

Sam Hunt began writing poetry when he was still at high school; he was first published in Landfall in 1967. His tenure as Burns Fellow was for ten weeks only, and he chose to live in Alan and Pat Roddick’s crib on Akapatiki Beach, near the harbourside settlement of Otakou, on the Dunedin Peninsula. He wrote a lot, and some of his output from that time was printed in, Drunkard’s Garden. Hunt’s poems are written to be read aloud, and he has spent most of his career travelling and performing his works in his own inimitable style. Perhaps the coffee stains on the cover of this volume are an indication of Hunt’s popularity?]]>
Sam Hunt]]> Books]]>

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!’]]>
Stuart Hoar]]> Books]]>

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]]>
]]> University of Otago]]> Forms (Documents)]]>
According to Charles Brasch’s journal entry for 8th June, 1969, it took Warren Dibble a few months to find his feet as the Robert Burns Fellow. Brasch comments that Dibble only ever felt ‘at ease’ on the stage which is where he spent a lot of time during his tenure. He also collaborated with artist, Ralph Hotere, and joined Hone Tuwhare for poetry readings. Dibble called his Burns Year a ‘kickstart’, in that he began works that he was never brave enough to attempt before. Dibble left New Zealand for Australia in the 1970s. This letter was written by Dibble to Special Collections Librarian, Dr Donald Kerr, regarding the exhibition held for the 50th Anniversary of the Robert Burns Fellowship.
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Warren Dibble]]> Correspondence]]>

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.’]]>
Witi Ihimaera]]> Books]]>