Martin Edmond held an eight-week residency from mid-March to May, also offered with the support of Creative New Zealand. Edmond was born in Ohakune and grew up in small North Island towns before studying in Auckland and Wellington. He spent five years touring internationally with the avant garde theatre group Red Mole. Since 1981, he has been a freelance writer based in Sydney and an occasional taxi driver. Several of his screenplays have been produced as award-winning feature films. Four of his books have been shortlisted in national book awards. The Autobiography of My Father (AUP, 1992) placed in the 1993 Wattie’s Book Awards and his memoir/travelogue of the mind Chronicle of the Unsung (AUP, 2004) won the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography. His most recent works include Waimarino County, The Evolution of Mirrors, The Supply Party and Luca Antara. Martin Edmond was the Writing Fellow at The University of Auckland in 2004 and in that same year was the joint winner of literary journal Landfall’s prestigious Essay Competition. He won a CLL Writers’ Award in 2007 to support the completion of his latest book Zone of the Marvellous (AUP). Works in progress include Dark Night: endless yet never, on Colin McCahon’s disappearance in Sydney in 1984, and The Isinglass Redaction, the story of a mysterious asylum seeker cast up on Antipodean shores.
Photo: Auckland University Press