| Date: | Wednesday 28 Mar, 5:30pm - 7pm |
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| Location: | Piko Café |
Join us for M4 - AUT Master’s Reading featuring a great line-up of celebrated Master of Creative Writing alumni and guests including Elizabeth Allen, Elizabeth Ho, Elizabeth (Libby) Kirkby-McLeod, Jacquie McRae, Kirsty Powell, Brendaniel Weir, Jenny White, Mike Johnson and C.K. Stead. View reader bios below.
RSVP to Farina Ibnul: farina.ibnul@aut.ac.nz to secure your place. A Cash bar is available.
Brendan Weir (pen name, Brendaniel Weir) was born in Auckland and took part in the Homosexual Law Reform marches as a schoolboy. He is an alumnus of the Masters of Creative Writing, also winning the post-graduate writing prize.
In 1993 while training as a pilot, Brendan founded FLAG, a support group for LGBT workers in the aviation industry. More recently, he co-founded OutSouth, a peer support network in south Auckland. While helping set up a web-based LGBT surrogacy network in Sweden, he became interested in exploring the ways marginalised communities can reconstruct and reclaim their histories. Tane's War is Brendaniel's first novel. It explores the intersection of three lives in the 1950s; Aussie and Briar, two young shearers working on a training station in Hunua and Tane, an older man responsible for their training. Tane's past haunts him, particularly his service during WW1. As Aussie and Briar fall in love Tane relives memories he has buried for decades.
C.K. Stead is the only one of our writers to have been both poet laureate (2015-2017) and won the Prime Minister’s Award for fiction (2011). He has won a number of major local and international literary prizes. Last year he published a collection of essays, Shelf
Life: Reviews, replies and reminiscences, and a new novel , The Necessary Angel, described by the London Sunday Times as ‘a gem’, and whose ‘stealthy crescendo’, the Spectator’s reviewer says, ‘will leave the reader gasping.’
Elizabeth has been writing novels since age 16 and been almost as inventive in trying to get them published. At 18, she went to the UK armed with an autobiography, and rented a post box to receive the avalanche of letters from publishers: none came. At age 21, her father paid to self-publish a novella set in Manchester. Printed in India, the covers were crumpled and the ink smeared. Most were sent to Manchester to be distributed for free and hopefully fall into the right hands – but Elizabeth failed to include any contact details in the books. She set her next two novels in the USA, self-published them on Amazon and launched a guerrilla marketing campaign: printing stickers for friends to put up all over the world, and possibly be spotted by Zadie Smith. But in six years she hasn’t sold a single hardcopy or earned a single cent. In 2015 she wrote Dreams of a Family Tree, a utopian adventure story set in New Zealand; then last year she wrote its dystopian opposite, Greyscale. Written as the thesis for her master’s at AUT, the novel has earned her a 2018 mentorship with Hachette Australia – so the tide might finally be turning in favour of conventional publication.
Jenny has been an English teacher for 20 years, but a lover of the language for a lot longer. Since learning to read at the age of three, she has not stopped exploring it. Enid Blyton's 'Folk of the Faraway Tree' opened her mind to the possibility of what could be imagined, and led her to writing. She moved from South Africa to south Auckland 21 years ago and has been a single mum for most of that time. Now that her kids are adults, she can indulge her passion. The Master of Creative Writing, last year, gave her the push needed to finish a novel.
Elizabeth (Libby) Kirkby-McLeod completed the Master of Creative Writing with Siobhan Harvey at AUT in 2017. She has had work published by Depot Press, in the journal takahe, and was long-listed for the 2008 'Six Pack 3' authors anthology. Her Master's thesis is a poetry collection in deep dialogue with the Reginald Rose play 'Twelve Angry Men'. The play is the source material for all the text of her poems creating a conceptual work which she layered with narrative and lyric. Elizabeth's collection tells the story of a father, his daughter and her son - a story not unlike her own.
Kirsty Powell completed the Master of Creative Writing in 2015 and graduated the following year. In 2017 her short story, The Space Between Extra and Ordinary opened the Cloud Ink Anthology ‘Fresh Ink – a collection of voices from Aotearoa, New Zealand’, and she is currently working with Cloud Ink towards the publication of her first novel from which she will read an excerpt this evening.
Jacquie McRae lives in Te Arai and is of Tainui descent. She received a place on the inaugural Te Papa Tupu scheme that mentors emerging writers. She has a Masters in Creative Writing with Honours. Her short stories have been published in several collections including an anthology from eighteen of New Zealand’s accomplished writers. Her young adult novel‘The Scent of Apples’ was published by Huia and wona gold medal in the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards for the Australia/New Zealand region. It was selected by the International Youth Library in Munich and received a White Ravens label. She has been involved in the Raglans Readers and Writers festival, running a fully-subscribed workshop there last year which encouraged people to write. She is still grappling with a final draft of her novel, ‘The Liminal space’ which she wrote as a component for her MCW. She has been awarded a Michael King writers residency for later in the year to work on a historical novel about the illicit whisky trade. It begins in Scotland and then travels into the Hokonui Hills of Southland.
As a Chicago native, Elizabeth writes about issues she’s seen first-hand - strained and broken family relationships, gun violence, race issues, sexism and diversity. In 2017 she completed the Master of Creative Writing, where she wrote an American Southern Gothic novel that delves into the lives of women who try to live different identities and explores what effects it has on their lives. This year Elizabeth hopes to focus on submitting her work to publishers as well as getting a short story or two published.