University of Otago fellowships named

Award-winning novelist and West Coast newspaper reporter Becky Manawatu has been named as next year’s University of Otago Burns Fellow.

The university also announced that next year’s Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance is Lucy Marinkovich, and Heather McQuillan is the University of Otago College of Education Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence.

This year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow, Bridget Reweti, and Mozart Fellow, Kenneth Young, have both received fellowships for a second year.

Otago humanities division pro-vice-chancellor Prof Tony Ballantyne said next year’s recipients included award-winning writers and artists tackling challenging social issues; composers creating soaring operas, and dancers working with the community.

Burns Fellow Ms Manawatu lives in Waimangaroa, and is a reporter at the Westport News.

Her first novel, Aue, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction and this year won the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction.

Her work dealt with gritty social issues with an authentic voice, a university spokesman said.

She said she wanted to use the time to learn, grow and develop some intelligence and understanding, she said.

Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance recipient Lucy Marinkovich is a Wellington-based freelance dance artist, choreographer, educator, practitioner and performer.

Through her planned work, InMotion: Dancing with Parkinson’s, she aimed to deliver dance classes to people living with Parkinson’s disease.

She aimed to use dance to support the Parkinson’s community and help individual people feel confident and positive about their bodies, she said.

Ms McQuillan, an award-winning children’s writer, said her selection for the fellowship was an incredible boost.

Ms McQuillan lives in Christchurch, where she is the director at Write On School for Young Writers. She will take up the residency in the Robert Lord Cottage in North Dunedin.

Ms Reweti will continue her Frances Hodgkins Fellowship next year with projects on history and indigenous engagement with the land.

Her work included photography and moving images and embraces early media such as the camera obscura, and having the fellowship would allow her work to develop further, she said.

Mr Young, a distinguished composer and musician, said he was two-thirds of the way through writing a chamber opera, which will then be followed by a song cycle and a string quartet.

He is working on another opera for soprano Anna Leese, among a series of works envisaged for completion during his tenure as Mozart Fellow.