Golden Bay writer wins NZ Society of Authors residency
The Top of the South branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors has chosen Golden Bay writer Gerard Hindmarsh as this year’s writer-in-residence for June.
The residency gives an established writer the chance to work in Nelson, supported by the Nelson City Council and other funding bodies. Artist Jane Evans has generously offered her Russell Street cottage as the writer’s accommodation for the month.
“It’ll be the perfect environment to expand and finish a defining work for me,” says Gerard, who is also a reporter for The GB Weekly. “I’m actually working on three major projects: the story of Kahurangi, a historical work about Stewart Island, and the start of a novel highlighting the rip-off of cultural heritage in the Pacific.”
Gerard is well known in the region. He has lived at Tukurua for more than 30 years and worked as a long-haul truck driver, in forestry and building, before moving into full-time journalism in 1991. That year he won the inaugural Cathay Pacific Travel Journalist of the Year Award, and his work has been published widely in New Zealand and overseas.
More recently, Gerard’s books have given faces and voices to the region’s history. Both Angelina – from Stromboli to D’Urville Island: A Family’s Story (2004) and Swamp Fever – a Golden Bay memoir (2006) were published by Craig Potton Publishing. Apart from having the chance to concentrate on some of his own projects, Gerard will be running a number of writing workshops.
Co-ordinator of the writer in residence project, Bridget Auchmuty, says, “Gerard has this wonderfully broad experience – in life as well as in writing. I think his workshops will help writers – of any level – to use the nuts and bolts of their own lives to work into credible fiction or non-fiction.”
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