Events 2011

Launch of Devonport: A Diary by Bill Direen

Update: Photographer Stuart Page was at the launch and took photos and a video of the event.

The Holloway Press is pleased to announce the publication of Devonport: A Diary by Bill Direen, a limited-edition book, written during his tenure of the University of Auckland/Michael King Centre/Creative New Zealand Literary Fellowship in 2010.

Devonport is the first in The Signalman’s House Series in which The Holloway Press, in association with The University of Auckland and the Michael King Writers’ Centre, plans to publish a work by each of the annual fellows who occupy the Signalman’s House on Mount Victoria in Devonport, the home of the Michael King Centre. Through these publications the link between the University of Auckland and the Michael King Centre will be strengthened.

Bill Direen, a writer and musician who has a writing career that goes back at least 25 years, held the six-month residency in 2010. Originally from Christchurch, Bill now lives in Paris.  Devonport: A Diary  (which is accompanied by Esplanade, a brief related fiction) is a lively, thoughtful and idiosyncratic collocation of observations on landscape and culture, reflections on writing and a spirited record of daily living in a rich marine, domestic and urban environment new to the returning New Zealander.  

Bill writes of the diary: After a few months at the Centre, I transcribed and printed some of my diaries, in order to let the chief administrator at the Centre know what impressions I had been having of life at the Centre and in Devonport. I did this also so that people connected with the Centre would know I was happy there ... another person might have felt lonely half way up an extinct (as far as we know) volcano far from family & receiving few visitors.

The Holloway Press was established at The University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. Its publication policy is to publish a range of texts appropriate to the technology of hand-printing which have unusual literary, artistic, scholarly and/or historical interest and which are unsuitable for commercial publication.

Devonport is designed, letterpress printed and bound for The Holloway Press by Tara McLeod. The edition is 100 copies.