Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship pure poetry
Departing Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow Sonja Yelich says she has produced her best work during her five month residence at the Sargeson Centre which ends this week, compiling a collection of poetry very much of the time and place.
She says her Fellowship has produced ‘the best writing I have ever done’, thanks to the luxury of an abundance of time and ‘pure concentration and continuity’.
The award-winning poet, who lives with her family on Auckland’s North Shore, says she spent Monday to Friday each week at the flat, worked a 24/7 ‘clock’, socialised very little, and spent her time reading and writing, producing enough work for several collections of poetry.
A week before the end of her residency, she spread her poems across the floor of the flat and assembled a collection - linked by a coherent story and single character - that she is ‘incredibly proud of and pleased with’.
‘I would never have written this book anywhere else but here,’ she says.
Yelich and novelist Sarah Laing were jointly awarded this year’s Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship which entitled each to a five-month tenure at the Sargeson Centre in Auckland city and a grant of $20,000. Yelich’s Clung won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry in the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book awards, and her collection Get Some was a finalist in the 2009 awards.
She has so enjoyed her Fellowship that she says incoming Fellow Sarah Laing may have to prize the poet from the Sargeson flat.
Yelich says when she told author Kevin Ireland of her reluctance to leave, Ireland directed her to the top of the stairs to look at the finger nail marks of former Fellows who have had to be dragged away!
But leave she must as Laing takes up her residency to work on her upcoming novel White Light, as well as other projects.
Laing’s novel Dead People’s Music was published to considerable acclaim in April, 2009, following an earlier collection of short stories Coming Up Roses in 2007. In 2006 she won the Sunday Star Times short story competition and in 2008 was a writer in residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Devonport.
Buddle Findlay National Chairman, Peter Chemis, says he’s delighted Yelich has found her time at the centre productive.
‘Given the distinguished tradition of this Fellowship, it’s great that recipients can achieve the quality of work they aspire to,’ he says.
‘It’s most gratifying that writers can make the most of the refuge and distraction-free time that the Fellowship and the Sargeson centre offers.’
The Sargeson Fellowship was established in 1987 to commemorate Frank Sargeson and provide assistance for New Zealand writers. It aims to offer outstanding writers the opportunity to write full time, free from financial pressure. Buddle Findlay has sponsored the Fellowship since 1997.
Last year’s Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellows were writers Steve Braunias and Julian Novitz. Other past Fellows (from 1997 onwards) include: Fiona Samuel, Peter Cox, Karyn Hay, Craig Marriner, Toa Fraser, Debra Daley, Denis Baker, Riemke Ensing, Vivienne Plumb, Chad Taylor, Shonagh Koea, Diane Brown, Catherine Chidgey, Sarah Quigley, Tina Shaw, Kapka Kassabova, Sue Reidy, James Brown, Charlotte Grimshaw, Emily Perkins, James George, Brigid Lowry and Paula Morris.