Guest Speaker: Victor Rodger

By Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature | Posted:

Creative Cities Southern Hui warmly welcomes VICTOR RODGER as delegate and guest speaker. Victor will be participating in events for the duration of the Hui, and speaking at Creative Connections on Thursday 30th November.

 'I have nothing but good memories from my time as the Robert Burns Fellow last year, and I am happy to seize any opportunity I can to return to the city that I dub 'The Big Easy'.'

Victor Rodger is a playwright of Samoan and Scottish descent whose plays include My Name is Gary Cooper, Sons and the multi-award winning Black Faggot which has been performed throughout New Zealand and Australia, as well as in Edinburgh and Honolulu. A former script writer for Shortland Street, he also wrote the Māori Television drama, This is Piki, alongside Briar Grace-Smith.

 His first short story, Like Shinderella, written when he was last year’s Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, was this year included in Black Marks on the White Page, an acclaimed anthology of Māori and Pasifika writing, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makeriti.

His essays A Voyage Round My Father and Provocations were also published this year in The Best of e-Tangata and The Fuse Box, respectively.

He has held various writing residencies such as the Fulbright- Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer in Residence at the University of Hawaii and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury. He is currently the Writer in Residence at Victoria University where he has written a new play, Uma Lava, created his first cabaret called Christ(Church) Almighty and also developed a collection of short fiction entitled Volare and Other Stories.

Creative Connections aims to explore creativity as the touchstone of healthy, sustainable communities and celebrate the power of collaboration to inspire.