Michelle is an award-winning writer and journalist from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She was the winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her journalism has appeared in Aotearoa and internationally, including in The Guardian, Stuff, New Zealand Geographic, The Melbourne Age and The Sunday Times, and her fiction has appeared in Landfall and Turbine/Kapohau. Her Debut fiction , Surplus Women, a collection of fifteen short stories, was released in April 2025.
Springing off the success and momentum of Surplus Women, Michelle is going to be using the time on her residency to develop a short story into a novel. It is a work of speculative fiction set mainly in a near future where a shared reality no longer exists, the fallout of which ripples through time and relationships.