Taranaki author wins international award for poetry

By Stuff - Catherine Groenestein | Posted:

Wonderful recognition for the 2024 University of Otago Robert Burns Fellow, Mikaela Nyman. Congratulations Mikaela.

Taranaki author wins major award | Stuff

A Taranaki writer who says she thought many times of giving up has received huge accolades from both sides of the world.

Mikaela Nyman, who lives in Taranaki but is from the Åland Islands between Finland and Sweden, writes in English and her native Swedish.

She has just been awarded a major prize worth €25,000 (just over NZ$44,000) by the Swedish Literary Society (SLS) in Finland for a poetry collection that connects Taranaki and the Åland Islands.

The SLS was founded in 1885 in memory of the Finnish national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg, and the prize was awarded on his birthday, February 5.

That was the same day that Nyman began her residency in Dunedin as the 2024 Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University, so she joined the celebration in wintry Finland online.

”It’s an amazing honour, it’s validating that my work is seen as valuable, appreciated and literary, all these great things,“ she said.

The poetry collection’s title in English is: “To get out of a rip tide you have to move sideways”, which is a line from one of her Back Beach poems.

The jury’s comments about the poems said: “... Through the poetic I’s reflections on the pandemic everyday life in New Zealand, Nyman connects the present with the past and Oceania with the Nordics. In surprising poetic and everyday images, flora, fauna and geology become conversation partners and fellow travellers.”

Nyman said having her work chosen for the award was a complete surprise.

The poems came from the years she was separated by the pandemic from her family on the islands, during which she missed her father’s 80th birthday.

“My poetry collection was not only about separation but on top of that, the war in Ukraine. My islands are the Peace Islands, they’re supposed to be demilitarised but they see Putin’s flights overhead, and submarines in the waters, it has been quite an anxious time.

“Then there’s climate change, in the midst of all this how do you cope with it all, these things are being thrown at us, so like being in a rip, the only way is to go sideways, not fight it.”

Writing in Swedish could be lonely as she did not have anyone close by to share her work with.

“I am working in solitude on the wrong side of the world.”

The pandemic also stymied the planned launch and promotion for her novel Sado (set in the aftermath of a cyclone in Vanuatu), that was released three days before the 2020 lockdown.

“One you’re off the radar you can never get back on, years of work go down the drain,” she said.

“I had many times sitting in Taranaki not getting a foot into any writers’ events, when I thought of giving up. My international connections, in Vanuatu and Nordic, kept me going.”

But this year, she is making up for it, settling in for her residency at Otago University, where she plans to write a second novel.