New Name For Sargeson Fellowship

The Sargeson Trust is delighted to announce that the 38-year-old Sargeson Fellowship will from 2026 be known as the Ireland Wilson Sargeson Fellowships.

For almost four decades, the Sargeson Fellowship has supported scores of Aotearoa New Zealand writers in the memory of distinguished author and generous mentor Frank Sargeson. Under the new name, the Fellowships will continue to see two outstanding published New Zealand writers each year supported to write full-time.

The new name for the Fellowships is in honour of author Kevin Ireland (1933–2023), who was himself one of the inaugural Sargeson Fellows in 1987, and writer and scholar Phillip Wilson (1922–2001), a long-time friend of Frank Sargeson.

The Trust is hugely grateful to the many generous donors who have made, and continue to make, the Sargeson Fellowships possible. Looking ahead, the Trust expresses special gratitude to Emeritus Professor Janet Wilson, who has promised a generous level of annual contributions in honour of her late husband Kevin Ireland and her late father Phillip Wilson. The new name of the Fellowships recognises Professor Wilson’s significant offering.

Chair of the Sargeson Trust Elizabeth Aitken-Rose says, “The Fellowships will enrich and nurture Aotearoa’s evolving literature in times increasingly hostile to the arts and humanities. Since 1987, the Frank Sargeson Fellowships have allowed writers to dedicate themselves to their craft and explore ideas that might otherwise not have been possible. Janet Frame and Kevin Ireland were the inaugural Fellows. Many have since become Aotearoa’s most prominent writers. Janet Wilson’s generosity honours Kevin Ireland and Phillip Wilson, both significant in Aotearoa’s literary landscape, and continues Sargeson's legacy of fostering the next generation of writers.”

Janet Wilson says, “I am delighted the Ireland Wilson Sargeson Fellowships will enable the Sargeson Trust to continue its important work of the last 38 years of fostering emerging New Zealand writers. It is particularly fitting because both my father, Phillip Wilson, and husband, Kevin Ireland, had strong personal ties with Frank Sargeson whose writing they admired, as well as with Chris Cole Catley, Sargeson's executor. This association with such a seminal literary figure and with the Trust that Chris Cole Catley set up in his name, enhances my wish to memorialise their names and work through this donation.”

An announcement of the new name for the Fellowships was made on 2 February 2025 at a celebration of the Frank Sargeson Collection – the writer’s archive of manuscripts, notebooks and letters at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington – being added to and recognised on UNESCO’s New Zealand Register, the Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao. The register celebrates “items of recorded heritage which have national significance” and “cultural and historic value”, and highlights Frank Sargeson’s work as “an appropriate language to deal with the material of New Zealand life”.

Further details about the Ireland Wilson Sargeson Fellowships, and a call for applications for 2026, will be released in September 2025.

History of the Fellowship:

The inaugural Sargeson Fellows in 1987 were Janet Frame, who described the importance of Sargeson’s friendship for her personal and literary life in the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at My Table, and Kevin Ireland. In 2007 the fellowship became the Buddle Finlay Sargeson Fellowship, and between 2014 and 2023 was the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship under the sponsorship of law firm Grimshaw & Co. Sargeson Fellowship recipients over the years have included Charlotte Grimshaw, Paula Morris, James George, Hera Lindsay Byrd, Chloe Lane and Nathan Joe. The 2025 Sargeson Fellowship was awarded to Rachael King and Kate Duignan who shared a stipend of $26,000.

About the Frank Sargeson Trust:

The Trust was set up in 1983 by Christine Cole Catley, Frank Sargeson’s heir and executor.The Trust aims to continue Sargeson’s lifelong generosity to writers through providing fellowships, while preserving his house in Takapuna, Auckland, as New Zealand’s first literary museum.For further information, see: https://franksargeson.nz/

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