Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust announces residencies for 2026–27

By Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust | Posted: Friday Aug 21, 2026

Six writers have been awarded residencies for late 2026 and early 2027 at the historic cottage in Ōtepoti Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

The Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust is delighted to announce that residencies for 2026–27 have been awarded to Connor Amor-Bendall, Tracy Farr, Helen Vivienne Fletcher, Zoë Meager, Josiah Morgan and Sue Orr.

Connor Amor-Bendall is the 2026 Auckland Pride Praise the Lord resident playwright, in collaboration with Samesame But Different and the Auckland Theatre Company. Connor is a writer, director and actor from Tairāwhiti whose debut play, The Clitoris Conundrum, premiered at Basement Theatre in 2024 and returned to Q Theatre for Pride in 2026. She won the 2024 Auckland V48 Hours WIFT Best Female/Gender Diverse Script Award for Down Slayment, has just finished one short film, What Is Left Unsaid, and is in post-production on her Day One funded short, Mutually Assured Destruction, which will premiere at Show Me Shorts in October. Connor participated in Proud Voices on Screen’s 2025 Queer Producers Incubator and Auckland Theatre Company’s 2025 Emerging Writers Table. At the cottage, Connor will undertake focused work on a queer period drama, currently titled Close Female Friends, inspired by the sapphic relationship between her great-great-aunt Edith Bendall and Katherine Mansfield.

Tracy Farr is a writer who used to be a scientist. Her third novel, Wonderland, won the 2024 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press prize, and was longlisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Tracy is curator and host of live literary series Bad Diaries Salon and its sister project Bad Diaries Podcast. She’s lived on Te Motu Kairangi Miramar Peninsula in Wellington for 30 years. Tracy's fourth novel, Holdfast, has a central character inspired by Dunedin-born scientist Dr Elizabeth (Betty) Batham, who founded the University of Otago’s Portobello Marine Biological Station in 1951. During her residency, Tracy will access key material in the Hocken Collections and visit places Batham lived, worked and travelled.

Helen Vivienne Fletcher is an award-winning children’s and young adult author, storyteller, creative writing tutor, and playwright from Wellington. Tackling heavy subjects with a healthy dose of humour, Helen describes her writing style as ‘funny tragedy’ and invites you to decide for yourself whether you want to laugh or cry. Her young adult thriller The Retreat (2025) is shortlisted for the 2026 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.Helen will be developing two new play ideas during her residency at the cottage. The first is a play for young people called Alexandra the (Not So) Great, and the second is a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Zoë Meager is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Gigantic Sequins, Granta, Landfall, Lost Balloon, Mascara Literary Review, Overland, Splonk, and The Offing, among others. In 2024 she was runner-up in the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition, received an honourable mention in the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Competition, and was a Sargeson Fellow. She won the Bristol Short Story Prize 2025 and was runner up in the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Zoë is the Fiction Editor at takahē and a Senior Tutor at The Creative Hub. During her residency Zoë will be revising a novel-length manuscript, a work of magical realism set in Greece.

Josiah Morgan (he/him, Kāi Tahu / Ngāti Maniapoto) is a poet, actor, drama teacher, performance artist, facilitator, reviewer, editor and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2026, he was the Visiting Writer at Washington State University’s creative writing programme. He is the author of i’m still growing (2024), and his novella Road: A Postlapsarian Comedy won the Macmillan Brown Writers Prize in 2021. His work has featured in The Spinoff, Landfall, Out Here and numerous other journals, blogs and magazines. His chapbook Black Window holds the featured poet slot in Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026. During his residency for this year’s New Zealand Young Writers Festival, Josiah will work on new poems and research toward a long-form poem entitled ‘Moa’.

Sue Orr is a fiction writer with a background in journalism and speechwriting. She is the author of two short story collections, Etiquette for a Dinner Party (2008) and From Under the Overcoat (2011), and two novels, The Party Line (2015) and Loop Tracks (2021). Sue holds a Masters and PhD in Creative Writing, and teaches creative writing at the IIML at Victoria University, as well as in Wellington prisons. She has established creative writing programmes at women’s refuges in Auckland, Porirua and Lower Hutt and trained new teachers for these courses. While at the cottage, Sue will be developing a novel with its genesis in the generational fall-out of the illegality of homosexuality in New Zealand until 1986.

Playwright Robert Lord (1945–1992) bought his cottage in Titan St, Dunedin, after taking up the 1987 Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. Before his death, Lord set up the Writers Cottage Trust and bequeathed his home to ‘support and assist established writers by providing accommodation in Dunedin free of rental as a retreat, to enable such writers to work on literary projects’. Located near the university and the town centre, the worker’s cottage has three furnished rooms and a courtyard garden. It has been run as a rent-free residency for writers since 2003.