Here is the link to the first episode in the series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLWXeBCpWTE&feature=youtu.be
Wednesdays at 8.30pm until 12 November – Sky Channel 83
New awards for young writers in the Auckland region are being launched by the Michael King Writers’ Centre this year, as part of the Michael King Young Writers Programme.
The Chris Cole Catley Writing Awards are open to all senior secondary students (Years 11, 12 and 13) across the Auckland region, with prizes for poetry, prose and lyrics.
The competition judges are Auckland University Press senior editor Anna Hodge, musician and head of the Play It Strange Trust, Mike Chunn.
Entries close on Tuesday October 14.
Winners of the poetry and prose categories will each receive a $150 cash prize, plus a selection of books. The winner of the lyrics category will have a recording session with Mike Chunn.
All entries will be considered for inclusion in Signals, the literary journal for young writers published annually by the Michael King Writers’ Centre. The winners of the awards will be announced at the launch of Signals 2014 at the National Library on December 6.
Rosalind Ali and Johanna Emeney, who run the Young Writers Programme, say they are excited about the opportunity to involve more young Auckland writers. They are looking for submissions that are fresh, original and have a distinctive voice.
The entry form and conditions are available on the Michael King Writers’ Centre website (www.writerscentre.org.nz) or email assistant@writerscentre.org
The awards are named in memory of Dame Chris Cole Catley, a pioneering journalist, author and publisher, who mentored many writers and journalists during her long career. She was a life-long friend of Michael King, a founding trustee of the Michael King Writers’ Centre and she established the centre’s first workshops for young writers. The Young Writers Programme, now in its third year, is offered thanks to funding from Creative New Zealand.
| For further information, please call Karren Beanland, Manager:Ph/fax: 445 8451
Email: manager@writerscentre.org.nz |
I was at Otaki College this morning doing poetry with a group of Year 9 and 10 students. I was really taken with the detail and sound as this poem unfolded. Being a big fan big of Matapouri Bay, this poem took me right back there.
Matapouri Bay
Midday sun bears down on the bay
hair whips around in a sudden, fierce breeze
starfish in the lowtide pools
clusters of small white flowers in the undergrowth
edging the large open green in front of the baches
slow estuary leading through the small dunes
clouds floating in an azure sky
families drift off to sleep
lulled by the soothing hush and hiss
of the waves.
Izzy, Y9
Over the next few months, I am on the road a lot promoting poetry for and by children in all kinds of ways — most importantly with my Hot Spot Poetry Tour of New Zealand. So the stack of poetry books to read and review just keeps growing. One of the key aims of Poetry Shelf is to draw attention to New Zealand poetry from books to events to opinions. In order to highlight recent books that I have enjoyed, I aim to do a cluster of shorter snapshots along with some slightly longer pieces.
As I make my travels through schools, communities and various venues, I have been wondering about the divide and the overlap between children’s writing and adult writing. Is there a void or is there a fertile set of bridges? Are the kind of hierarchies that Margaret Mahy endured still at work? The more I think about the issue, the more complex it becomes.
51 poems were entered in this competition. It was wonderful to see this enthusiastic response from young writers in our community. The standard of writing overall was impressively high. We want to nurture this talent and look forward to reading even more entries in next year’s competition.
Wordsworth said that the poet’s craft is a matter of putting “the best words in the best order”. The winning poems all show that quality. To use a musical analogy, each is well-tuned for the particular song it wants to sing.
Several poems were especially striking, and have been highly commended. The three winning poems were works that stretched things to a more demanding level, linguistically, poetically and philosophically. Congratulations to everyone who is mentioned here. Thanks to every poet who entered, and to all the teachers who encouraged them to do so.
For results see here
New literary translation prize for NZ secondary schools, to be judged by Eleanor Catton
New Zealand’s leading national reading charity, the New Zealand Book Council, is pleased to announce the inaugural Moving Words prize – a literary translation prize for New Zealand secondary schools.
The prize has been developed by the New Zealand Book Council in conjunction with the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation and Wai-te-ata Press at Victoria University of Wellington, and the Ministry of Education. The prize is a reflection of New Zealand’s multi-ethnic and multilingual society and aims to inspire and reward excellence in literary translation by secondary-level students.
“We are delighted to be able to offer an avenue for the celebration of literature and language in our secondary schools and to inspire students to approach writing, and indeed reading, from a fresh perspective,” says New Zealand Book Council CEO, Catriona Ferguson.
Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton will chair a judging panel that will select the top three entries out of 20 shortlisted entries.
The prize is awarded for the best previously unpublished translation into English, te reo Māori or New Zealand Sign Language of a piece of poetry or prose of no longer than 400 words.
Prizes are:
· $500 to the first place winner(s) and $500 to their school.
· $250 to the second place winner(s) and $250 to their school.
· $125 to the third place winner(s) and $125 to their school.
· A special prize will be awarded by the Honourable Chris Finlayson to the best translation from Latin or Greek.
Translations will be judged on accuracy, literary merit and on the entrant’s choice of the original piece for thematic and stylistic complexity.
The award is open to New Zealand residents or citizens who are attending a New Zealand secondary school, or receiving home schooling at a secondary school level, and are under 19 years of age at the closing date for submissions to the competition.
Closing date for submissions is 26 September 2014.
Entry forms can be downloaded from http://www.movingwordsnz.weebly.com or by emailing movingwordsnz@bookcouncil.org.nz.
For further information, visit http://www.movingwordsnz.weebly.com.
For more information on the work of the New Zealand Book Council go to:
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz
http://www.booknotes-unbound.org.nz
http://www.facebook.com/NewZealandBookCouncil
@nzbookcouncil
For media enquiries, please contact New Zealand Book Council Communications Managers:
Rachel O’Neill (Rachel@bookcouncil.org.nz)
Phone: +64 4 801 5546
Fax: +64 4 801 5547
Catherine Cradwick (CatherineC@bookcouncil.org.nz)
Phone: +64 4 801 5546
Fax: +64 4 801 5547
Gregory O’Brien was in conversation with Kim Hill this morning talking about Michele Leggott’s collection, Heartland (AUP). Michele’s book is a finalist in the Poetry section of The NZ Post Book Awards this year. Kim and Gregory pondered ‘difficulty’ in poetry but mostly uncovered the way Michele’s book opens its arms to the reader. Gregory is a poetry storehouse as he leads you this way and that, towards and away from the poems. Hearing Michele read from one or two was magnificent– the musicality evident, the electric connections multiple, the images resonant, the personal glimpses alluring. You can hear the discussion here.
Siobhan Harvey: Conversations by Owl-Light, Alexandra Fraser, Steele Roberts, July 2014 Conversations by Owl-Light is the first collection by Auckland author, Alexandra Fraser who is one of the finest contemporary writers engaging with scientific themes in New Zealand. Chemistry, love, botany, family, astronomy, tarot and ancestry: this heady mix of themes is delicately and decidedly well handled by Fraser’s evocative language, pinpoint accuracy and sumptuous concern for human interaction. See here for more details.
Autobiography of a Margueritte, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Hue & Cry, June 2014 See here. Each time I read this first collection of prose-poems by Butcher-McGunnigle I’m staggered by its depth, skill, astuteness and vibrancy. A workbook for illness; a diary of familial dysfunction; a finely tuned navigation through self-representation and identity: Autobiography of a Margueritte is all this and more. A must-read.
Siobhan Harvey‘s recent books are 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry winning Cloudboy (Otago University Press) and, as co-editor with James Norcliffe and Harry Ricketts, Essential NZ Poems – Facing the Empty Page (Penguin Random House NZ, 2014). Recently, a poem from a new work she is creating was runner up in 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition.
Harry Ricketts: I Knew the Bride, Hugo Williams, Faber & Faber, 2014 Hugo Williams is my favourite contemporary English poet. His line in mordant wit and lurching loss gets me every time. Here the suite of poems called ‘From the Dialysis Ward’ really hits the spot.
Harry Ricketts recently co-edited Essential NZ Poems – Facing the Empty Page (Penguin Random House NZ, 2014). Harry has a new collection of poems out next year with Victoria University Press.
James Norcliffe: A couple of the poetry books I have been reading recently are Siobhan Harvey’s Cloudboy and James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys.
Cloudboy is a remarkable achievement: passionate, imaginative and sustained. It’s hard enough to pull off a short sequence but Siobhan negotiates a book length sequence effortlessly. It is easy to see how this book won the Kathleen Grattan Award last year.
I returned to James Tate’s book because I wanted to talk about flash fiction to a class at the Christchurch School for Young Writers just in advance of National Flash Fiction Day on (appropriately) the shortest day. I’ve been a huge admirer of James Tate ever since I came across The Lost Pilot years and years ago. Return to the City of White Donkeys is a collection of prose poems wry, often funny and often unsettling. Wonderful. I really enjoy Tate’s deadpan surrealism and I was lucky enough to hear him read in America a few years back. There was standing room only on a bleak rainy night.
James Norcliffe recently co-edited Essential NZ Poems – Facing the Empty Page (Penguin Random House NZ, 2014).
Jack Ross: First of all, there’s the Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). I picked this up secondhand and have been reading it with increasing delight and respect ever since. There’s something plain and straightforward about this guy that really appeals to me. When the book was nominated for the 2013 Pulitzer prize, the citation read: “a half century of poems reflecting a creative author’s commitment to living fully and honestly and to producing straightforward work that illuminates everyday experience with startling clarity,” which I think is quite nicely put. He’s the very opposite of a showboat poet (not that they can’t be fun too, sometimes). He died shortly after the book appeared, so it really is the last word on a lifetime devoted to the craft.
Another book I’ve been reading in this month is the final, complete version of Doc Drumheller’s 10 x (10 + ’10) = 0 (Christchurch: The Republic of Oma Rāpeti Press, 2014). I first met Doc last year, at the Hawke’s Bay Poetry Conference (though we’d been corresponding on and off for years), and found him a very interesting person to talk to. This huge, ten-part poem, compiled over the past decade, consists of a series of poems compiled according to stringent writing restrictions, rather in the mode of an Oulipo project. The tenth and twentieth poem in each volume is a palindrome, reading the same backwards and forwards. Give the popularity of such poets as Christian Bok (Eunoia), it’s nice to know that New Zealand has its own workshop of potential literature humming away down there on the Canterbury Plains (and finding periodic expression in the journal Catalyst, which Drumheller also edits).
Jack Ross teaches at Massey University Albany. He has a poetry book coming out later in the year from HeadworX. It’s called “A Clearer Look at the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014.” Catch up with what he is doing on his blog here.
Emily Dobson: On my bedside table for the last little while has been Marty Smith’s Horse with Hat (VUP: 2014). Any adjective I think of for this book I quickly think of its opposite – it is loud, but also quiet, wicked but also exquisitely tender, you get this primal sense of the horses but it is utterly human – the affection the poems have for their characters is palpable. The collaboration with Brendan O’Brien is brilliant. One of my favourite poems is ‘A mile here, a mile there’, which completely floored me when I first read it on Turbine. Knowing what Marty has put into these poems from when I first met many of them 10 years ago on the MA, I can’t think of a more deserving winner of the Best First Book of Poetry in this year’s NZ Post Book Awards. I’m very proud of her.
Emily Dobson‘s new collection of poems, The Lonely Nude, was published by Victoria University Press in July. I will review this on Poetry Shelf.
NZ Poetry Shelf 