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SIMON S AY S Wellingtonian Simon Devitt, a world-renowned architectural photographer and award-winning photo-book author, has had work featured in international magazines including Vogue and Dwell, and has tens of thousands of Instagram followers. His new book Cape to Bluff is his “slow walk” down Aotearoa, photographing the country’s most ingenious and forward-thinking residential architecture. “Because my other books are quite niche,” Simon says, “I was curious about making a more commercially-minded book than my others, without losing artistic appeal. I hope it will be around a while, rather than being just another coffee-table book.”
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WATERFRONT WANDER
It’s not often writers get handed $60,000. Wellington historian Vincent O’Malley has won one of three Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement. “This feels very special,” he tells us, “because it’s recognition not just for a single work but acknowledging my entire career as a writer and historian devoted to ensuring the history of Aotearoa New Zealand is acknowledged and remembered”. Vincent and the other winners (fiction writer Stephanie Johnson, and poet James Norcliffe) will lunch with the PM in March.
Kāpiti Coast poet Helen Heath is this year off to the Michael King Writers’ Centre in the Signalman’s House on Takuranga Mt Victoria in Devonport, Auckland. In 2023 the centre is offering 18 residencies, to 10 established and eight emerging writers. Helen will work on a memoir of her life and ancestors, drawing on diaries, letters, written and other texts, memory, artefacts, and research.
If you’ve walked along Wellington’s waterfront, you’ve probably noticed some of the 23 quotations from New Zealand writers scattered from Kumutoto stream around to Oriental Bay, in the form of concrete plaques, or inlaid metal text on wooden “benchmarks”. Stumbling upon them adds interest to a harbour walk, and the Wellington Writers Walk has a new mobilefriendly website with an interactive map, telling you about each excerpt and author – for example, that the Denis Glover quotation comes from “Wellington Harbour is a Laundry”, from his collection Come High Water. The plaque is adjacent to Frank Kitts Park and the Wahine memorial.
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