Kerry is an Australian-born writer who moved to New Zealand in late 2012 and now calls Aotearoa home. She is based in Te Tauihu, the top of the South Island, where she has been the curator of the Nelson Arts Festival’s literary programme since 2018.Kerry has a MA in Creative Writing from Victoria

Our 10th writer-in-residence for the year, Hannah is a Wellington-based writer who completed her Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2024. She has previously been a 2020 NZSA Youth Mentorship Award recipient, the 2021 winner of the Maurice Gee Prize in Chi

Sam is the Assistant Curator of the New Zealand Cartoons and Comics Archive at the National Library of New Zealand, and a working comic artist. He has developed comic resources and contributed to publications and journals across the globe. Sam is particularly interested in inclusive and intersection

Kirsteen holds our first residency for the year. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, she has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and her short stories and creative non-fiction have been published in Landfall, ReadingRoom, Takahē, Headland and in various collections. During her reside

Joy, our 13th resident for the year, lives in Pōneke. Her debut collection of short fiction Dream Girl was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2020. Her writing can be found in journals an

Claire is the founder of literary organisations Verb Wellington and LitCrawl Wellington. She is co-curator of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts’ writers programme, and is the books editor at The Spinoff. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with her partner Andrew and son, Charlie.Her firs

Dani, our fifth writer-in-residence for 2024 is a wellington-based writer of poetry, essays, scripts and short fiction. They completed their Masters of Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2021, and their debut collection, Transposium, was published by Auckland Univer

Tehnuka (she/they) is a Tamil tauiwi volcanologist born and raised in Ōtautahi, and living in Kirikiriroa. She has over thirty short stories, poems, and essays published in magazines and anthologies. Her stories have been highly commended in the NZ Sunday Star Times short story contest and shortlist

Sonya is an award-winning writer, reporter and producer and is the founder and Executive Director of the children’s charity Kiwi Christmas Books. She was a broadcast journalist for more than 20 years, reporting and presenting for shows such as 20/20, Breakfast, One News and Sunday, before completing

We have welcomed Rose, a Wellington based writer, as our first writer-in-residence for 2024. Rose gained her Masters of Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2018 and was awarded the Modern Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her first essay collection  All Who Live

Our final writer-in-residence for the year, Ruby is a prose-writer, poet and artist. She tutors creative writing at the University of Auckland, and in high schools. She was the winner of the Wallace Foundation Short Fiction Award in 2017, and the inaugural winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize in 2018

Originally from Kyiv, Nataliya is a Christchurch-based writer, playwright, street performer, researcher, theatre-maker and a Gothic nerd. She is the founder and director of NO Productions Theatre company which, since 2012, has produced over twenty original theatre shows in Canterbury and beyond. Rig

Gwynneth is a writer and editor from Ōtautahi Christchurch who recently became the librarian at Christchurch Women’s Prison.Writing essays since the mid-1990s, her practice has involved persistent experimentation with forms, methodologies and subject positions – auto-theory, ficto-criticism and di

Josie lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland with her husband and two daughters. Her debut novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts will be published by Allen & Unwin New Zealand in May 2023. Her short fiction has been published on Newsroom.co.nz and in literary journals, and she writes book r

Anna is an award winning journalist, writer and critic. She writes regularly for Newsroom, Metro Magazine, The Listener and The Guardian, among other outlets, and she is a book critic for RNZ. In 2022 she was named runner up best reviewer in the 2022 Voyager Media Awards.Whilst on her residency An

Madison is a Wellington-based editor and works for the Air Force. Her hobbies include painting and chronically reinventing herself. She holds a Master of Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and is the author of the Ockham award winning essay collection Specimen, publi

Craig is a Wellington-based writer who works as Publishing Manager at Te Herenga Waka University Press and is our 14th writer-in-residence for the year. His short story ‘The Rule of Twelfths’ appeared in Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy, and hi

We have welcomed our 12th resident for the year Shriya – her creative practice (plays, film scripts, short stories, and poems) focuses on people’s daily life rendered extraordinary by their unique personal experiences.In 2015 Shriya produced her first photo project titled ‘the Backstory Project’.

Tara is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based cartoonist and art school drop-out. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Massey University and can often be found in the front row of book events, illustrating authors and their ideas. You can find her work in many places, including The Sapling, Stasis Journ

Matthew is a writer, scholar, and teacher based in Wellington. He returned home in 2021 after several years teaching university English in Iowa. Much of his scholarship has focused on the mimetic theory of René Girard, and he is currently working on a literary and cultural study of the rivalries bet