Pinkest gay in the village shortlisted for Surrey

A dozen writers – some of them leading figures in New Zealand literature, some of them complete nobodies – have been shortlisted for the fairly glamorous, definitely long-winded and awesomely enumerated Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award in Association with Newsroom and Dick and Jude Frizzell.
The elite doz were selected from a grand total of 141 entries. About 20 writers only just missed out on the shortlist – the quality was high, very high, causing judges terrible stresses and strains, which are only going to get worse as they narrow the field down to the grand winner, plus second place, third place, and two runners-up. These winners all gain free accommodation at the marvellous mock-Tudor stylings of the Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland, and a share of $5000 loot as put up by Jude Frizzell and her husband, painter and author Dick Frizzell.
As per tradition since the award was conceived in 2016, the winners will be announced live on the wireless when I appear alongside Jesse Mulligan on his celebrated Afternoons show on Radio New Zealand, next Wednesday, October 16, at 1:35pm.
The shortlisted 12 are:
Josie Shapiro won the inaugural Allen & Unwin fiction prize in 2022 for the novel that was later published and became a bestseller, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts (also translated in France). She wishes to work on her second novel, The Art of Falling: “There’s a lot of skateboarding and a bit of sex, a lot of drinking and a bit of surfing.”
Breton Dukes. The Dunedin author of two acclaimed collections of short stories published by Victoria University Press, who works as a cook in a bar, wishes to work on a novel titled The Idea of Love: “The project begins with Marco working as a cook in a bar. The night gets very busy. Orders pile up. Marco takes tramadol and more tramadol. His family shows up at the bar. Men from his old school come into the kitchen, there are questions they want to ask him….”
Nicky Perry and Kirsty Roby. Sisters! And co-writers of rom-com novels. “In June, we took a trip to Stewart Island to research for our 7th novel,” they emailed. “Lawrence Lloyd, famous NZ artist, and owner of the Hatwell hotel on NZ’s smallest island, has died. He’s left the hotel to anyone who bothers to turn up to his funeral. Liv is desperate to escape from the media circus surrounding her, ever since she turned down the proposal of NZ’s favourite All Black. Ambrose wants to leave his job and run the hotel on the island where he spent idyllic summer holidays. They don’t like each other much. But they each own half the hotel…”
Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley in Central Otago and taught at Penn University last year. She wishes to work on her second collection of essays, An Activist in a Small Town. “I write from a unique perspective of life in New Zealand with the chance to record, reflect and interrogate what it means to live in a geographically contained valley in a community of less than 150 people.”
Emma Hislop. The New Plymouth author of an acclaimed collection of short stories published by Te Herenga Waka University Press wishes to work on a novel, titled Cure: “It takes place over seven days. I continue to be interested in power, and this novel uses the art gallery as a site for exploring the differences and complexities between and within Te Ao Māori and Te Ao Pākehā, in a work context … Individual histories and the impacts of colonisation are examined.”
Laura Borrowdale. The Christchurch author of Sex, With Animals wishes to work on a collection of “haunting, challenging and subversive stories that reimagine dystopian narratives, childhood and everyday monsters”, as well as a novel: “Sylvie can measure the time she has left by the blister packs of life-saving medication she carries with her.”
Te Ariki Wi Neera writes, “At dawn, on the 23rd July 1846, 200 plus armed soldiers invaded and abducted the Ngāti Toa Rangatira leader Te Rauparaha from his pā on the shores of Porirua harbour. This was carried out on the orders of the Governor, George Grey, who watched from a safe distance. Te Rauparaha was held without trial for 18 months. Not a lot is known about this period of detention of Te Rauparaha. Both Māori and Pākehā records of this time are minimal to say the least. This story attempts to address that deficit. About me…I am a direct descendant of Te Rauparaha living and working on the Kāpiti Coast.”
Erica Stretton writes, “I am working on a project called Sticks, a rural noir short story collection. It explores what it means to be rural, living in places without pavements, movie theatres, supermarkets. It seeks out the hiding places of lonely people and examines darkness and lightin the suffocating small societies of rural Aotearoa.”
Sam Duckor-Jones has become world famous on the West Coast for his incredible restoration of a church into a pink home called Gloria. He writes, “The day you published that excerpt from Gloria’s daily log back in 2022, Fergus Barrowman emailed me to say THWUP wished to publish a ‘Gloria book’. Since then I have been collating the various press that’s been written on Gloria of Greymouth (North & South, Listener, Guardian, School Journal, Art Zone, Home, Folio & of course the Greymouth Star, among others). I’ve also written a number of short essays on colour, alcoholism, lawncare, queerness, community, loneliness, employment, rage, art making… There are parts that have an unintentional memoir feel … I’m trying to include only what is necessary to understand the Gloria of Greymouth project.”
Connie Buchanan of Hamilton is writing a novel called Baddie. It begins, “Ainsley Roberts is eight years old and riding his silver BMX on a path by a wide brown river. He sails down the smooth strap of concrete towards a squat block of public toilets. As he is saying woo-hoo and lifting his hands high from the handlebars to copy his older cousin up ahead, at that very moment, inside the toilets, a woman is being (as a detective will later put it) deprived of her life. A maniac stands over the woman and plunges a blade again and again. The metal shreds her throat to jagged meat and her mouth opens airless and mute.”
Paula Morris is a living legend of New Zealand letters who has won the national fiction prize but serves New Zealand writing so selflessly that she rarely finds time to work on her own books. She wishes to write a novel titled Yellow Palace, a dark comedy set in the months leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016. The three POV characters are Māori who have worked in Europe for a long time. They all live in fear of having to return to NZ.
Michelle Tayler wishes to work on her novel Twenty Five, which corresponds to the age of her protagonist; it’s set in the 1980s, in Gisborne, and also in Wellington: “The backdrop for this emotional whirlwind is a bohemian household of creatives, all struggling to make ends meet in austere social and economic times.” I flatted with Michelle in Wellington in the 1980s! I was bohemian and struggling! But I wasn’t creative, so I probably haven’t inspired any of her characters.
Dami Jung writes, “My novel The Greenstone is the story of a Korean girl named Jimin who lived in New Zealand in the 1990s and how this experience affected her life. Her broken family and culture parallel the political and social movements in South Korea. Like Jimin, my family immigrated from South Korea in 1994. I was 15 years old, and we ran an Ice Cream shop. Once, I was a piano prodigy and played at Aotea Center, but I crumbled under the pressure and self-doubt. I published a novel in Korea in 2011, and I only thought of writing in English once I had the story of The Greenstone. Because the story was too close to my heart, I didn’t want to write in Korean. I needed the distance to be able to write it. I also felt it essential to tell a story about Koreans living in New Zealand. It’s been 30 years since the first wave of Korean immigrants, but hardly any story about us, by us. But most of all, I wanted to write a story about finding a home and making your own family with a kindred spirit.”
Okay so that’s 13 writers, or 14 if you count the fact that one entry comes from two writers, the sisters Nicky Perry and Kirsty Roby.
Many thanks to everyone who entered. There were so many great ideas and tons of energy. Bravo to those who just narrowly missed the shortlist cut, including Devon Webb, for her portfolio of incredibly lively poems, each of them a blazing column of fire; Diane Robinson, accountant by day, acclaimed crime writer away from the balance sheet; Janet Peters, a memoirist who remembered the bizarre advice, “Don’t sit on concrete, it will give you piles”; Jacquie Greaves who wishes to work on a collection of six speculative novellas, The Ghost Assassins of Bijou, and says, “Probably my most important qualifications are being both a member of the LGBTQI community and a post-menopausal woman filled with rage after six decades of dealing with the patriarchy”; and Megan Otto, who came up with far and away the most original idea – a picture book on the artwork made by … her cat Charlie: “In his elderly years this cat (unbelievably) created art in his cat biscuits or artificial cat food. He never ‘played’ with raw meat. Charlie died in 2018 at 17.5 years.” Someone should get hold of Megan and publish that book. I have seen the photos and they are pretty mind-blowing.
Previous winners include Becky Manawatu, who acknowledges the benefits of her Surrey Hotel residency in her latest novel Kataraina; the finest essayist in New Zealand, John Summers, who worked on his masterpiece The Commercial Hotel at the Surrey; and Colleen Maria Lenihan, author of the spectacular short story collection, Kōhine.
Writing is one of the toughest games in town. Recognition is rare. I hope all the writers who entered the 2024 Surrey prize keep at it; in the meantime, good luck to the shortlisted 12 (okay 13), as they await the fateful moment of whether the golden throat of Jesse Mulligan will pronounce their names as winners, live on Radio New Zealand, next Wednesday, October 16, at 1:35pm.