2023 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award

By newsroom - Steve Braunias | Posted:

Applications close Sunday 20 August

$5K Surrey Hotel writers prize returns (newsroom.co.nz)

New Zealand's coolest writers residency award is back, via Newsroom, Dick Frizzell, and a Grey Lynn hotel

Established authors, promising writers, and desperadoes burning, burning, burning like fabulous yellow roman candles or whatever are invited to enter the 2023 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award in association with Newsroom and Dick Frizzell. There is $5000 to be won in cold hard cash plus the honour and prestige of being awarded the coolest writers residency prize in New Zealand - winners get to stay in an actual hotel, with room service, with breakfast, with really interesting carpet in the hallways.

Applications open today, as of now, this very second, for the 2023 prize. Entries close soon, very soon; and a winner will be announced in about four weeks time, live on Jesse Mullligan's afternoon show on Radio New Zealand, as per tradition. The award is now in its seventh year. Previous winners and finalists include Talia Marshall, Becky Manawatu, Naomi Arnold, Anna Rankin, and Laurence Fearnley. Some men have won it, too.

Dick Frizzell, a writer who paints for a living, has shown amazing generosity by putting forward $5,000 towards the residency. His loot will be shared between three or maybe four winners. The first-place winner will receive a week's free accommodation at the singular Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland, with cooked breakfast thrown in plus the Surrey's famous Sunday roast. Vegetarians can elect for more peas I suppose. There are two runners-up. Second place will receive five nights accommodation a the Surrey; third place will receive four nights accommodation.

The Surrey Hotel is widely considered the grooviest writers residency in New Zealand arts and letters. It’s got ye olde Tudor stylings and the swimming pool has to be seen to be believed. The residency allows winners the comfort, glamour and fun of staying at the distinctly odd and certainly very striking Surrey to work on their masterpiece.

Last year there were 131 entries. Ten made the longlist. The 2022 winner was J Wiremu Kane, who pocketed $3000, and used his week at the Surrey to work on a historical novel, Whakarongorua: "It will begin at the 1825 battle of Te-Ika-a-ranga-nui, through the deaths of Hongi Hika and Uruti Tewhareumu, the end of the musket wars, the rapid colonisation of Te Tai Tokerau, the burning of Kororareka", etc. Ambitious! Second place and $1000 went to acclaimed Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley, to work on a novel set in a hotel: "I was thinking of a place like the Kelvin Hotel in Invercargill or the Brydone in Oamaru or the Surrey in Auckland." Third place and $500 each was shared by Shelley Burne-Field and good old Becky Manawatu.

Seven nights, five nights, four nights – of course it's not long enough to complete anything, but the idea of the Surrey is to provide writers with beautiful and eccentric privacy to focus on their latest masterpiece, and maybe get somewhere with it, find an opening, create a scene, compose very good sentences. Claire Baylis was a finalist in 2018. She stayed at the Surrey to work on the manuscript for a novel - which is being published by Allen & Unwin this week. Dice is about the trial of a group of teenage boys who have made up a sex game based on the roll of a dice and is told from the perspective of the jurors. I heard from Claire recently. She emailed, "Residencies are awesome I reckon for giving writers a real boost, both because you feel great when you’re awarded one, but also in how much focus it provides just by giving you the permission to do nothing but write. And as a mum I very much rate shorter residencies because for years my family commitments have precluded me from applying for the longer residencies."

I love that assessment. I look forward to the entries for the 2023 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award in association with Newsroom and Dick Frizzell. Email stephen11@xtra.co.nz with the subject line in screaming caps THE SURREY HOTEL WRITERS RESIDENCY AWARD IN ASSOCIATION WITH NEWSROOM AND DICK FRIZZELL. The cut-off is midnight, Sunday, August 20. Send in a brief covering letter outlining the project you have in mind, and it wouldn’t hurt to maybe attach a few pages of the work in progress. Otherwise, the conditions of entry are really quite permissive. Previous winners and finalists can apply. New Zealand writers will be preferred, meaning anyone who lives here or has lived here or is thinking about it. Established authors and complete nobodies will be assessed on the merit of their application so long as they have had something published somewhere, in print or online. Novelists, short story writers, poets, memoirists, biographers....This is for writers of books, and books only for adults; no screenplay writers, no playwrights, no comics illustrators, no YA or children's authors. It's all about a book intended for grown-ups.

Winners will need to take up their residency before February 1, 2024. Dick Frizzell's hard-earned prize money will only be transferred when the winners actually arrive at the Surrey Hotel. An international panel will act as judges. To old authors, to young writers, to mad people of whatever age with a good book in them: go forth and apply, and good luck.