The six-month University of Auckland Residency at the MKWC was awarded to Frankie McMillan for a book of small narrative forms, mainly prose poetry and flash fiction. A postcard of a chimpanzees’ tea party, pasted by Anne Frank on her bedroom wall in Amsterdam has been the starting point for this new work.
In 2009 Frankie won first prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. In both 2013 and 2015 she was the winner of the New Zealand Flash Fiction Award. Other awards include the Creative New Zealand Todd New Writers’ Bursary in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell residency in creative writing at the University of Canterbury in 2014. Her most recent book, My Mother and the Hungarians and other small fictions (CUP) has been long listed for the 2017 Ockham Book Awards.
Frankie says, ‘ The writer’s studio here is wonderful; half way up a mountain and with views to the sea with the added bonus of knowing other writers, whose work I admire, have also used this space’.
(Photo by Andy Lukey)