Robert Lord Writers In Residence Announced

The Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust announces that its first writers in residence are as follows:

Pauline Cartwright: March - May 2003 David Hill: June - August 2003 Gary Henderson: September 2003 - June 2004

The first two residents are distinguished writers for children and they will hold concurrent residencies at the Dunedin College of Education. Pauline (who lives in Alexandra) plans an historical novel for children set in Dunedin and the goldfields. She has received a Choysa Children’s Literature Bursary, and has been a finalist in several New Zealand Post Aim Book Awards and with photographer Tim Hawkins won the NZ Post 1999 Honour Award for All Sorts of Trucks. She anticipates the time in Dunedin “with great relish. I will be able to check and do further research and be able to indulge my head and my hands totally in writing - using the college’s facilities and the Robert Lord cottage as living quarters will be a delicious selfishness and also a time of re focussing.”

David Hill, who is from New Plymouth, has written 22 novels for readers aged 10 to 16 and is published in New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Holland, China, Norway and Estonia. His books See Ya Simon, Take It Easy, Fat, Four-Eyed and Useless have won prestigious awards. While in Dunedin he will be hard at work on a new novel for young adults. Hill says it is going to need detailed research and that he “looks forward to being a participant in the local literary scene while in Dunedin.”

Gary Henderson, of Auckland, is an award-winning playwright (The Big Blue Planet Earth Show, Sunset Café, Skin Tight, Mo and Jess Kill Susie, An Unseasonable Fall of Snow). He will work half-time teaching playwriting at the University of Otago and has plans to work on two plays and a screenplay while in Dunedin

The Cottage Trust residencies provide rent-free accommodation for writers to live at the Dunedin cottage left for this purpose by the playwright Robert Lord. Lord died in 1992 in Dunedin. He left his Titan Street Cottage to be used as a residence for writers following the death of his mother. Last year however his mother (who celebrated her 90th birthday last week) and the Cottage Trust announced that they would launch the residency as Robert had intended in his mother’s lifetime.

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