Newsletter – 11 October 2011 ISSN: 1178-9441
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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MODERN LETTERS Te P¯utahi Tuhi Auaha o te Ao Newsletter – 11 October 2011 ISSN: 1178-9441 This is the 174th in a series of occasional newsletters from the Victoria University centre of the International Institute of Modern Letters. For more information about any of the items, please email modernletters. 1. MA and PhD application deadlines ........................................................................ 1 2. The Turbine deadline .............................................................................................. 2 3. The Iowa deadline .................................................................................................... 2 4. O Le Tulafale ............................................................................................................ 2 5. Writers on Mondays ................................................................................................ 2 6. Two readings ............................................................................................................ 3 7. Commonwealth Prizes ............................................................................................. 3 8. Morningstar .............................................................................................................. 3 9. Bird North takes flight ............................................................................................ 4 10. Working briefs ....................................................................................................... 4 11. New Travel Writer ................................................................................................. 5 12. The Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize ................................................ 5 13. Gecko Press evening .............................................................................................. 5 14. NZWG and NZFC Pitching Workshops .............................................................. 6 15. Chris Price on the move ........................................................................................ 6 16. Recent web reading ................................................................................................ 7 _____________________________________________________________________ 1. MA and PhD application deadlines In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Well, yes, Mr Tennyson, but in the southern hemisphere, spring is also the time when our thoughts turn to the application deadlines for the IIML’s MA and PhD programmes . Information about our PhD is here while details of current PhD projects are here. Information about the one-year MA is here. With the PhD, places are made available as current students complete (we expect to have three places available for a 2012 start). However, with the MA, we accept 30 1 students each year – 10 into the scriptwriting stream, and 20 into the two page-writing workshops. By page-writing, we mean fiction (long and short), poetry and creative non-fiction. By scriptwriting, we mean writing for the big and small screen and for radio, as well as for the stage. Some pretty significant books have started life in our graduate programmes recently, such as Laurence Fearnley's The Hut Builder, winner of this year's NZ Book Award for Fiction. Stage and screen projects are having their moments, too - not only Tusi Tamasese's acclaimed and Oscar-bound The Orator (on which, more below), but also the main-bill plays by Hannah McKie and Gavin McGibbon which have enjoyed sell-out houses at BATS. The application deadline for both MA and PhD programmes is 1 November. 2. The Turbine deadline A reminder that submissions for the next issue of Turbine close on October 21st – that’s next week, folks. Go here for details of how to submit your work, and here to browse the Turbines of yore. 3. The Iowa deadline If you want to fast-track your writing this summer, remember that we offer the Iowa Workshop, a special credit-bearing course taught by outstanding graduates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, America’s oldest and most prestigious creative writing programme. This summer we are offering separate workshops in poetry and fiction from 9 January to 17 February. Enrolment is restricted to 12 students per workshop, and applications close on 9 November. Start here for further information. 4. O Le Tulafale No one will be surprised to hear we’re still feeling pretty chuffed about The Orator, which started life in 2007 in Ken Duncum’s scriptwriting MA. It went to Venice and a standing ovation, it’s been getting reviews like this, and it now looks as if it will be an Oscar nominee. We think that this – in writer and director Tusi Tamasese’s own words – is probably the world’s first glimpse of The Orator, while this is probably the second. 5. Writers on Mondays This week saw the last of our Writers on Mondays presentations for 2011 – Patrick Evans in conversation with John Newton about his impressive novel Gifted. An excellent homosocial time was had by all. It's been a fine and busy programme this year, with constantly big audiences. Highlights have included the annual Best New Zealand Poems reading and the Joy Harjo event, chaired by Patricia Grace, and presented in the face of a nearly snowed-in Wellington. Big thanks to Te Papa, Circa, 2 and City Gallery for hosting us, to all the writers and presenters; and even bigger thanks to Bernadette Hall for curating this year's programme. It takes a lot of work and imaginative flair to put these things together, and Bernadette has an apparently endless supply of both commodities. Thanks, too, to Katie Hardwick-Smith for so much practical work behind the scenes. 6. Two readings Sometimes Bernadette Hall gets time to write her own poems, and she’ll be reading some of them at the NZ Poetry Society’s October meeting, next Monday, 7.30 pm at the Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St, Thorndon. The evening starts with an open mic, and there is a small door charge of $5 ($3 for NZPS members). The IIML’s Bill Manhire will be one of four poets reading on Friday 21 October at the Palmerston North Central Library. More information here. 7. Commonwealth Prizes We were delighted to see MA graduate Sarah Bainbridge winning the Pacific region award for the 2011 Commonwealth Short Story Competition for her story ‘Ginger Beer’. ‘I wanted to write a story about home-made ginger beer because as a child it seemed the perfect combination of delicious and dangerous, with explosive potential.’ Next year the various Commonwealth prizes are being revamped, with the admirable aim of discovering and acknowledging new writers. There will be a best first book award, and a short story award. Fuller information here. 8. Morningstar This year’s Writer in Residence, Albert Belz, has seen several productions of his earlier plays opening around the country. There’s the successful national tour of Raising the Titanics, of course, but here as well is the NZ Herald review of his award- winning Jack the Ripper number, Yours Truly, that recently opened in Auckland (the season closes on October 22). Amidst all this activity, Albert’s been getting on with new work, and here’s a message from him offering an early peek at his new play Morningstar. ‘I would like to thank Creative New Zealand and Victoria University, in particular the faculty and staff of the International Institute of Modern Letters, for giving me the opportunity to focus entirely on my own projects this year. Staff and students are invited to a rehearsed public reading of Morningstar to be held at Studio 77 (77 Fairlie Terrace, Kelburn Wellington) @ 6-8pm on Wednesday 9th November. Senior Lecturer David O Donnell has very kindly agreed to direct the piece. Morningstar has been my major work during the residency – it is set in the Kingdom of Heaven before the fall of the arch-angel Lucifer. Earth has just been created, the Master spends all his time “cavorting” with the naked apes, His throne sits vacant, all while 3 new passions are being awakened in those angels who step foot in Eden . .’ 9. Bird North takes flight We liked the review in this week’s NZ Listener of Breton Dukes’s Bird North: Breton Dukes is a recent graduate of Victoria University’s vaunted creative writing programme, and his earlier work in journals like Sport and Turbine gives some hint of what to expect from his debut collection – brief, stark sentences, uncompromising honesty in language and content, perfectly timed flashes of lyricism. The polished tales in Bird North and other stories add sudden contrasts and subtle confounding of a reader’s expectations into the mix, demanding careful reading – and rewarding it handsomely. Confident, nuanced and unselfconsciously local, this is an accomplished debut. We imagine Breton was also pretty pleased with the reviewer in the Otago Daily Times, who reviewed Roddy Doyle’s new story collection, then moved on to Bird North: Roddy Doyle is a hard act to follow, but in Bird North, New Zealand author Breton Dukes does it with a gritty, and sometimes disturbing collection of stories that illustrate the pitfalls and dilemmas facing teen to mid-20s Kiwi males. 10. Working briefs The prizes and shortlistings just keep on keeping on for Eleanor Catton's novel The Rehearsal. In its French translation (La répétition), it has been short-listed for the abroad category of the Prix Médicis which is awarded to an author whose ‘fame does not yet match their talent’ (David Vann won the award last year) and for the Prix Femina literature award