The voice of afternoon rest and recreation in New Zealand, Jesse Mulligan, will announce the winners of a lucrative and intensely contested writers residency, available both in honking Auckland and hushed Māpua, live on air at about 1.45pm today on his Radio New Zealand Afternoons show.
The winners of the 2026 Surrey Hotel and Māpua Apple Pickers Cottages Writers Residency Award held in association with Newsroom and Jude and Dick Frizzell will take a share of $10,000 and be granted a week’s accommodation at either an amazing hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland or in a boutique shack at the Apple Pickers Cottages near Nelson.
It marks the 10th anniversary of the award. I saunter into the RNZ studios around this time each year since 2016, exchange on-air pleasantries with Jesse, and pass him bits of paper with the names of the chosen few. His golden throat does the rest. Two writers will share first prize at the Surrey and pocket $1500 and seven nights. Second place receives $1200 and five nights. Third place receives $800 and four nights. First prize at Māpua wins $3000 and seven nights. Second place receives $1500 and five nights. Third place receives $500 and four nights.
One runner-up at each address gets no money, not a bean, nothing, but can regard their nomination as a great honour and are awarded three free nights.
Record entries were received this year from 233 writers. A shortlist of 11 at each residency was published last month.
At the Surrey, the 1st XI shortlist is: former RNZ broadcaster Karyn Hay, who wishes to work on her latest novel with a snazzy elevator pitch (“A woman disappears”); Nafanua Purcell Kersel of Maraekākaho, winner of this year’s Biggsy Prize for Poetry at the Ockhams for her collection Black Sugarcane, who wishes to work on her next book; Karl Puschmann of Pāpāmoa, recently the number one bestselling author in the land as the ghostwriter of Home Again by Shihad screecher Jon Toogood, who wishes to work on his crime caper Dealers; Jordan Tricklebank, the best literary critic of his generation, wishes to write a history/critical response to Māori speculative fiction; Laura Vincent of Waiuku, shortlisted for this year’s fiction prize at the Ockhams for her novel Hoods Landing, wishes to work on a novel with an irresistible premise (the Leader of the Opposition wants to kill the Prime Minister); Fergus Porteous of Ōtaki wishes to write a memoir that will “focus mostly on my relationship with my dad, and my deep and abiding fear of death and dementia”; Breton Dukes of Dunedin, author of the year’s best novel, Party Boy, wishes to work on his second novel (“This would be the first NZ novel to open with someone cleaning a fridge”); Stacy Gregg wishes to work on At Every Bend, A Taniwha, a Māori supernatural sequel to her bestseller Nine Girls (“I want to do for Ngāruawāhia what Stephen King did for Maine”); Airini Beautrais of Whanganui wishes to write a kind of memoir (“As a single woman in my forties with a low income, I am actively looking for ways to spend the second half of my life that are less lonely and more economically viable”); Bee Trudgeon of Cannons Creek wishes to work on her poetry; and Peter Walker of Ninety Mile Beach, who wishes to work on a collection of essays (“They open with an account of a chance meeting with Donald Trump.”)
At Māpua, the shortlisted 1st XI are Grant Smithies of Nelson, who wishes to work on a collection of short stories set to be published by Thwup in 2027; Megan Nicol Reed wishes to work on her third novel, inspired by reading a chapter in my book The Survivors about Eloi Rolland, the French teenager who has been missing since he tried to walk to Piha in 2020; Tess Casey of Island Bay wishes to work on a fiction project based on her great-grandma’s sad life (“She was put in Seacliff Mental Hospital at the age of 36 and never made it out”); Shelley Burne-Field of Hawkes Bay wishes to work on a collection of short stories set to be published by Thwup in 2028; Karla Akuhata wishes to work on Mereaira: A Love Story, “a literary novel that braids together three generations of a Māori family across contemporary Aotearoa-New Zealand, the colonial era and the nineteenth century”; Josiah Morgan of Christchurch wishes to work on a single poem, an epic of 100 pages (“The poem is about a Kāi Tahu human attempting to surgically transform themselves—literally—into a moa”); Jacquie McRae of Te Arai wishes to work on a historical novel set in 1863; Jordan Hamel wishes to work on his novel Southern Gold which he told me about recently over a beer recently at Swashbucklers (“Steve, like I said at the pub, I’m still working on the elevator pitch, so for now I’ll just use the one you gave me: Three students go mad in Dunedin”); Ellen Curnow of the Westport News wishes to work on her novel about a small coastal district threatened by rising seas; Stef Harris wishes to work on his new thriller Kill Danny Burke which opens, “I kill people for money”; and Emma Hislop of Taranaki wishes to work on Mask, “a short novel examining the invisible descent into postpartum psychosis”.
The field is about to be narrowed. It will be a tense morning for the 22 writers who form the shortlisted elite. They will be afraid they cursed their chances with a covering letter that said too much or said too little. They will be thinking that writing is not a horse race and do not know why they have been saddled. They will be hoping for the best but resigned to disappointment because to write is to suffer, despair, fail, and die slowly.
But writing is also to experience fleeting moments of joy. Those moments will arrive for the writers judged winners of the Surrey Hotel and Māpua Apple Pickers Cottages Writers Residency in association with Jude and Dick Frizzell, and good old Newsroom, when Jesse Mulligan rustles pieces of paper and reads off of them at 1.45pm on local frequencies nationwide.
PREVIOUS FIRST PLACE WINNERS OF THE SURREY HOTEL RESIDENCY AWARD
2016: Kelly Dennett
2017: Serena Benson
2018: Megan Dunn
2019: Colleen Maria Lenihan
2020: Mia Gaudin
2021: Talia Marshall
2022: J Wiremu Kane
2023: Emma Ling Sidnam
2024: Paula Morris
2025: Joanna Cho
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