Performer and choreographer Suzanne Cowan and composer and music teacher Christopher Adams, both also Auckland residents, have been awarded, respectively, next year's Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance and the Mozart Fellowship.
Wellington-based artist Joanna Langford will be the next year's Frances Hodgkins Fellow.
University of Otago vice-chancellor Prof David Skegg announced the university's latest arts fellowships yesterday.
Ms Powles said she had been excited to gain the Burns Fellowship, which was the country's top literary residency.
She was elated to be in the "dream scenario of being able to write full-time and feast wholeheartedly on words without interruption".
She lives in Waitakere, has a master of creative writing degree from Auckland University (2006), and became director of New Zealand Book Month last year.
Her first novel, Weathered Bones, was published this year.
As Burns Fellow, she plans to write a novel inspired by the life of Woody Guthrie and the international work of a Huntington's disease expert, Prof Richard Faull, exploring themes of medical ethics and biology.
An award-winning neuroscientist, Prof Faull is based at Auckland University, having earlier gained an MB ChB through studying at Otago University (1965-1970).
Ms Powles, who is a former dancer, is pleased that her friend, Ms Cowan, will also be in Dunedin next year, having been awarded the Plummer dance fellowship.
Ms Cowan plans to choreograph a dance project, called Sight Lines, from the perspective of people with visual impairments.
Working with the Dunedin sight-impaired community and students from university dance studies, she plans to use the media of dance, photography, video and sound to create a vision for dance as a means of embracing diversity and difference.
She also drew on her own experience of living with a spinal injury and using a wheelchair, she said.
Mr Adams said the Mozart Fellowship was a "fantastic opportunity', as the country's longest-standing composition residency.
He won the prestigious Philip Neill Memorial Prize for his work Persephone last year and the University Madrigal Singers Prize for Excellence in Composition for Voice, the latter from Canterbury University, in 1998.
He plans to complete a large-scale orchestral work next year.
Ms Langford, who works with everyday materials to create whimsical and imaginative sculptures, is "very excited and honoured" to gain the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship.
Since 2006, she has won three prestigious arts residencies including the Royal Over-Seas League Residency, in London and Scotland in 2007.
She is looking forward to "experimentation with new materials and technology and having the time for research and critical reflection".
