Mulligan’s announcement at 1.35pm

Jesse Mulligan, the Voice of God these past eight years when it comes to the Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award (held in association with Newsroom, and Jude and Dick Frizzell), will once again announce the winners on his Radio New Zealand Afternoons show, at 1.35pm.
The grooviest residency award in New Zealand letters was established in 2016. Mulligan agreed to broadcast the winners live on air, and has done so every year since. His golden throat will be on hand, to mangle a metaphor, this afternoon, to announce the names of the winners as well as the loot that will be allocated to them by patrons Jude and Dick Frizzell. They have put up $5000 (actually $5500 – I begged them for another $500 on Monday and they said okay) to be shared by writers who are judged first, second and third. As per since forever, I will join Jesse in the studio and pass him the winners’ names on scraps of paper. I will write them in capital letters to make it easier for him to read. Broadcasters prefer it like that or at least that’s what Paul Holmes once said to me.
The winners will also receive free accommodation at the Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland, to work on their masterpiece. I got the idea for the residency after I put myself up at the Surrey in 2015 to work on my book The Scene of the Crime. It was a strange and inspiring cloistered space, a fantastic experience, an opportunity to work day and night in comfort, and I thought: Other writers would benefit from this too. Surrey manager Louise Yau has very kindly continued the hotel’s patronage into 2024.
Writers were invited to apply last month. There were 141 entries. The only criteria is that each applicant had to have something published somewhere, and wished to work on a book for adults – no YA or whatever. Experienced authors and complete nobodies sent in covering letters, samples of the work in progress, and occasional drawings.
Those who made it to the shortlist are:

Te Ariki Wi Neera wishes to write about Te Rauparaha when he was held without trial for 18 months. “I am a direct descendant of Te Rauparaha living and working on the Kāpiti Coast.”
Josie Shapiro, author of bestselling novel Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, wishes to work on her second novel: “There’s a lot of skateboarding and a bit of sex, a lot of drinking and a bit of surfing.”
Dami Jung, who immigrated here with her family from South Korea when she was 15 and a piano prodigy, wishes to write a novel, and remarks, “It’s been 30 years since the first wave of Korean immigrants, but hardly any story about us, by us.”
Breton Dukes, a Dunedin author who works as a cook in bar, wishes to work on a novel about a man who works as a cook in a bar.
Nicky Perry and Kirsty Roby are sisters, and co-writers of rom-com novels, who wish to work on their seventh novel, set on Stewart Island.
Emma Hislop, a New Plymouth author, wishes to work on a novel which explores “the differences and complexities between and within Te Ao Māori and Te Ao Pākehā”.
Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley in Central Otago and wishes to work on a book of essays which “interrogate what it means to live in a geographically contained valley in a community of less than 150 people”.
Paula Morris is a living legend of New Zealand letters who has won the national fiction prize but serves New Zealand writing so selflessly that she rarely finds time to work on her own books. She wishes to write a novel set in England as told by three Māori who live in fear of having to return to NZ.
Laura Borrowdale, a Christchurch author, wishes to work on short stories, and a novel about a woman who “can measure the time she has left by the blister packs of life-saving medication she carries with her”.
Erica Stretton wishes to work on a “rural noir short story collection about living in the suffocating small societies of Aotearoa”.
Connie Buchanan of Hamilton wishes to work on a novel that begins with “a woman being (as a detective will later put it) deprived of her life”.
Michelle Tayler wishes to work on a novel set in “a bohemian household of creatives, all struggling to make ends meet in austere social and economic times” in the 1980s.
Sam Duckor-Jones has become world famous on the West Coast for his incredible restoration of a church into a pink home called Gloria. He wishes to write a memoir about “her”.
That’s a lot of wishes. Jesse Mulligan will announce which writers wll achieve their dreams of Surrey residency, live on RNZ at 1.35pm; a story will magically appear at ReadingRoom mere minutes later; and the course of New Zealand literature will be changed, changed utterly, possibly.