A new Foundation established by the Auckland Writers Festival aims to strengthen Aotearoa’s literary landscape.

The Mātātuhi Foundation, launched this evening, will provide opportunities for New Zealand writers to develop and promote their works and for readers to increase their engagement with the work of local writers and will fund activities that contribute to literacy in this country.

Auckland Writers Festival Chair, Pip Muir says the launch of the Mātātuhi Foundation is the next step in the realisation of a long-held dream.

“When the Festival began almost 20 years’ ago, meetings were held around a kitchen table. Since then, the appetite to engage with writers from New Zealand and around the world has grown exponentially and with it the opportunity to deepen our commitment to our literary landscape.

“It is absolutely fantastic that the Festival has reached a point where it can further contribute to the national reading and writing community. We are thrilled to be able support the nation’s literature with the launch of this ground-breaking initiative.”

The Foundation will operate independently of the Auckland Writers Festival Trust and initially aims to make up to ten one-off grants of $2000 – $5000 per year whilst building an endowment platform to support its long-term endeavours.

Inaugural Committee members are professional director and senior finance executive Anne Blackburn (Chair), writer and academic Paula Morris, Festival Trust Board Chair and lawyer Pip Muir, Auckland Writers Festival Director Anne O’Brien and country head of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand and Book Council board member Peter Vial.

Ms Blackburn says she relishes the opportunity to work with an organisation that supports New Zealand literature. “I very much look forward to receiving applications from groups that seek to engage more readers and also from our writers, whose words and ideas enrich our lives.”

Applicants are invited to submit expressions of interest twice a year, with deadlines of 31 October and 31 May.

For further information please contact Penny Hartill, hPR, 021 721 424, penny@hartillpr.co.nz

Judge Elizabeth Morton and winner Gillian Roach

Gillian Roach is this year’s winner of the NEW VOICES – Emerging Poets Competition.

Post-graduate student of the Masters in Creative Writing, AUT. Roach is an Auckland poet and fiction writer who recently completed the Masters In Creative Writing course at AUT. She studied English Literature and Language at Victoria University and has a diploma in journalism.

Her poem ‘A boy says he has no say’ was described by this year’s judge Elizabeth Morton as, “a delicate poem, with an enviable lightness of touch. The movement from one stanza to the next is gentle‚ and the suburban scenes, with hedges and lemon tree‚ are delightfully familiar. But this is also a poem with grit and a sadness ostensible if you rub away at the props. The deeper unfoldings are not explicit‚ but it is clear there is a turn of darkness here – ‘disappointment’‚ the neighbours ‘gathered in mourning’ and the ‘dead duck head down in murky summer’‚ the ‘small sadness … neither fruit nor bud’. This poem is a gut-punch, and kept igniting questions. Each time I read it I felt closer to its truth.

Runner-up: PATRICIA HANIFIN (ex student of AUT, lives in Auckland)

Has had work published in Turbine, Flash Frontier, Headland and others. In 2014, she was runner up in National Flash Fiction Day (NZ) competition. She’s recently completed a novel, Ghost Travellers.

Morton described her poem On being silent too long as, visceral and urgent, thick with the fluids and salts that flesh entails. It is a poem of the untouched and unspoken, of the once ineffable backlog of words that come flooding out with a sort of violent energy. There are old tropes re-fangled and sutured together to create something vital and fabulist – there are wolves at the door, salt in the wounds, a crown of thorns. This poem commands attention and wears its fierceness like a medallion.

Elizabeth Morton said she was “gobsmacked by the attention and craft of the sixty poems in the menagerie. There were critters of all types – long, squat, form-driven and free-range. There were beasts of poems, poems that slunk and yowled, poems that tipitoed, and many poems that pounced in the last couple of lines, leaving me whiplashed, winded, awestruck. I found lines that could be printed on t-shirts. I found time-travel – both back and forward – nostalgic reminiscence, to climate change and apocalypse. There were poems that spoke to their creators – poems that had seen terrible things, poems that asserted a finger in the face of dissension and adversity, poems that coexisted with pain. There were poems I wanted to talk to over a cup of tea. There were poems I wanted to hug. There were so many poems that were vulnerable, took risks, ached at my heart – and yet many of these were left without placings, without chairs to sit. There are so many good poems standing awkwardly by the door because I just couldn’t keep adding commendations.”

Highly Commended

Lincoln Jaques – Undertaking a Master of Creative Writing Student, AUT
Sarah Scott – from Wellington is studying for her Masters in Art History at the University of Auckland
Commended

Savannah Mouat – Studying Pschycology at Massey University’s Albany Campus.

Daniel Nissen-Ellison – Studying Art and English at the University of Auckland.

Lydia Chai – is studying law at the University of Auckland

For all the winning poems go here

Report from judge, Charles Olsen:

It’s the hospice, the old provincial hospice.
A decrepit building with blackened roof tiles,
Where in summer in the eves swifts nest
And the caw of crows sharpens winter nights.’

– Opening lines of The Hospice, Antonio Machado (Translation by Charles Olsen)

This poem caught my attention as I was reading the Spanish poet Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla for the first time having just been awarded the III Antonio Machado Poetry Residency in Segovia and Soria in Spain, more of which later. So I decided to choose from it the five words for this year’s Given Words competition: decrepit, window, nest, cast and snow. Each participant had from the beginning of August until National Poetry Day 24th August to write a poem that included the five words. Over 120 poets of all ages took up the challenge so I had my work cut out making a selection of my favourites and deciding on the winners.

I find it interesting how the same five words can lead to such a diverse range of poems and I am particularly drawn to those where you hardly even realize the five words are there and also those where the words are not used in an obvious way. These are both true of the piece I chose for ‘Best Poem’, the peculiar Processional with it’s otherworldly use of the five words beginning with ‘the baying of nests’ and the sensations it leaves hanging in the air like the ‘decrepit forms’ in the wake of this quasi-religious funerary procession.

Here is Processional by Craig McGeady:

Processional

Matching coveralls and wide brimmed hats
three marching in funerary procession
heads bowed beneath the baying of nests
as if that for which they mourn
is yearning from the other side of silence.

The first balances a weed-eater on his shoulder
the second pushes a mower, the third
carries a broom of brambles, as they follow
a stoic path between turning trees
ignorant of the leaves that catch upon their brims.

They wade through waves of decrepit forms
whose flesh once echoed sunlight
while brethren maddeningly cling to bitter boughs
shaken by unceasing winds, announcing
winter on the verge of snow.

Their steps slow, time is a window to the past
the heady cast of sweat and stench
of nests before abandonment took hold
heavily, those final steps are taken
to darkened doors and the silence of home.

For ‘Best Poem by Under-16s’ I chose Seasons Poem which deftly sets the scene with all five words, opening with snow as a cast ‘keeping the broken bones of earth/while they heal’. Although, as in many of the poems sent in, a nest is a nest, a window is a window and snow is snow, each element has its own particular place in the story as it gently unfolds with the change of the season. This is Seasons Poem by Jemma Prileszky, aged 13:

Seasons Poem

winter is here
the snow today is like a big cast
keeping the broken bones of earth
while they heal
a decrepit bird’s nest sits in frost
at the base of a black tree
from the window, a boy sees three eggs
pale blue as a frozen sea
slowly freezing while the unknown bird
is away
he doesn’t want to watch
turns away
asks the air if mother will return
to save her children
spring is here
the cold shell of winter broken
life bursts from newly healed wounds
a black tree is no longer black
instead shimmers pink as its flowers
ruffle in the breeze
the boy wades through ankle-deep grass
content
boots shuffle
cicada hum
something cracks underfoot
carefully hidden by snow long-forgotten
at the tree’s base
lies the nest
icy ocean eggs have disappeared
along with the cold
something new here
besides the nest
surrounded by delicate spring snowdrops
an ivory skeleton
of the mother bird
she’d been there all along

It was a difficult task choosing just two winners and I encourage you to take time to read the rest of the selected poems on Given Words – they all contain the same five words but each has it’s own story to tell.

So now, as we get closer to autumn in Spain, I’m about to head off to start my residency in the Spanish cities of Segovia and Soria, where Antonio Machado lived and worked, looking for inspiration to write my own poems. Everyone is telling me to make sure I pack warm clothes because – although we like to think of Spain as a hot Mediterranean climate – it can get bitterly cold in the winter months and you realise why the old houses have stone walls over a metre thick and wooden window shutters to keep out the cold (as well as the baking sun). I will be sharing photos from the residency on Instagram: @colsenart, like the one above of the beautiful River Duero passing through Soria that I took during the book fair in August, and my plan is to spend time walking in the countryside and the cities, meeting people and taking time to paint and film alongside my writing. So, as well as finding inspiration in Machado’s descriptions of the Castilian countryside and the people who live there I’m sure something of the two poems above with their descriptions of the changing seasons and the way people interact with their environment will also stay with me during the residency. And I’m going to have a go with the five words myself…

About the winners

Craig McGeady is from Greymouth and lives with his wife and two daughters in Xuzhou, China. He is a teacher at the China University of Mining and Technology. His writing runs the gamut of length and form thanks to a homeroom teacher with a penchant for Michael Moorcock. Poetry first came to him in study classes in the small prefab classrooms on the fringes of Fraser High School in Hamilton. craigmcgeady.wordpress.com

Jemma Prileszky is a thirteen-year-old high school student. Her main interest and hobby is writing and she is always scribbling or typing; busy capturing new ideas. She has been attending The School for Young Writers in Christchurch for the past four years. When her fingers are aching from typing or holding her pen she relaxes with her pets, including her gorgeous whippets Kirby and Pip and her rescue cat Miss Maple.

The winners’ prizes were kindly provided by Massey University Press and Mākaro Press.

Each year the University of Waikato invites applications for the position of Writer in Residence, tenable for twelve months from January. The salary is $52,000 jointly funded by the University of Waikato and Creative New Zealand, the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.

The position is open to poets, novelists, short story writers, dramatists, and writers of serious non-fiction. The appointment will be made on the basis of a proven track record of publications of high quality, and on the strength of the applicant’s Residency proposal.

The Writer is expected to live in Hamilton during the tenure of the award. There are no teaching or lecturing duties attached to the award, the sole purpose of which is to give the Writer the freedom to write. It is expected the Writer will participate in the cultural life of the University. The Writer will be able to make use of the Michael King Writers’ Retreat in Opoutere for up to two weeks (current market value $3,000).

Enquiries can be made to Assoc. Prof. Sarah Shieff, telephone 07 838 4466 extension 8425 or email: sarah.shieff@waikato.ac.nz

Closing date: 12 October 2018 (NZ time)

Vacancy number: 380360

For more information and to apply visit here