{"id":29330,"date":"2015-06-14T06:30:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T18:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=29330"},"modified":"2015-06-14T10:45:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T22:45:34","slug":"celebrating-christchurchs-sir-julius-vogel-award-winners-my-keynote-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2015\/06\/14\/celebrating-christchurchs-sir-julius-vogel-award-winners-my-keynote-address\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award Winners: My Keynote Address"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Event_Poster\"<\/a>Yesterday, I was honoured to deliver the keynote address at an event celebrating Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award Winners.<\/p>\n

I’ll be reporting more fully on the event tomorrow, but for now, I’ll share the address:
\n.<\/span><\/p>\n

“I am delighted and honoured to be part of today\u2019s event \u2013 for several reasons. The first is that I believe taking time to appreciate what<\/em> we do, in this case writing and books, and achievement<\/em> in what we do, is really important. It is about affirming, not only that creativity matters but that we<\/em> matter, both as individuals and as a community of writers and readers. As writing can be a lonely occupation \u2013 what I like to refer to as \u201cthe loneliness of the long distance writer\u201d \u2013 coming together at all, but particularly to celebrate success, is doubly worthwhile.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Amanda\"<\/a>I also believe that the importance of community, and supporting and celebrating each other, is a lesson that the last four years of earthquakes and aftermath have underscored for everyone in Christchurch and the surrounding regions. So I am glad we have the opportunity today to celebrate Christchurch writing success and support Christchurch writers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s celebration is also timely because it comes at a period when sponsorship for NZ literary awards and events is at extremely low ebb. In particular, I note that there will be no National Book Awards this year, that NZ Book Month has been indefinitely postponed, and that the Bank of New Zealand has pulled its long-time sponsorship of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition.<\/span><\/p>\n

So although the record attendance at the recent Auckland Writers\u2019 Festival suggests that the hunger for writing and literary events is<\/em> very much part of NZ society, I still believe that an essential step in sustaining a literary culture in which NZ books and authors are valued is through first celebrating ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Rebecca\"<\/a>Today, we are particularly honouring NZ speculative literature, perhaps better known through its main sub-categories of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror \u2013 a grand tradition that—as Beaulah has pointed out—goes back to an early premier, Sir Julius Vogel, who added writing fiction to his many talents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although in reality, speculative literature goes back a great deal further than the late 19th<\/sup> century. As the great Ursula Le Guin, winner of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, recently observed:<\/span><\/p>\n

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality. \u2018Surface elements\u2019\u2026[i.e. magical or fantastic beings and constituent parts]\u2026which occur in certain works of great literary merit such as <\/em>Beowulf, the <\/em>Morte d\u2019Arthur, and <\/em>The Lord of the Rings, are also much imitated\u2026[but]\u2026Their presence or absence is not what constitutes a fantasy. Literary fantasy is the result of a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story, such as those comprised in <\/em>The Odyssey, or <\/em>Alice in Wonderland.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Like Ms. Le Guin, I also look back to works as enduring as The Odyssey<\/em> and the Aeneid<\/em>, through The Faerie Queene<\/em> and A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, to contemporary works such as Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Ms. Le Guin\u2019s The Left Hand Of Darkness<\/em>, and Haruki Murakami\u2019s The Windup Bird Chronicle<\/em> \u2013 all of which exemplify \u201c\u2026a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

NZ also has its exemplars, from the use of supernatural elements and magical realism in Patricia Grace\u2019s Mutuwhenua<\/em> or Keri Hulme\u2019s The Bone People<\/em>, to a host of outstanding YA works, not least Elizabeth Knox\u2019s \u201cDream\u201d duology and the many classic works by Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee. Today, we are joined in our celebration by several more of those award-winning YA authors: James Norcliffe, Jane Higgins, Rachael King, and Joanna Orwin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Tim\"<\/a>In short, the great literary tradition of speculative fiction is very much alive, well \u2013 and living right here in New Zealand. We are all here today \u2013 I believe and hope \u2013 to celebrate that fact, but also to \u201cawhi\u201d and support the four new talents who have recently been recognized through the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. As you can see from the posters, these are intended to recognize excellence in works of New Zealand Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before we all turn our attention to their particular achievements, I would like to reflect briefly on the importance and place of awards, a question that was put to me several times in interviews after I won the Gemmell Morningstar Award, and again when I was a finalist for the Legend Award in 2013. Arguably, at one level awards don\u2019t matter at all since the reason I write \u2013 and I imagine it\u2019s pretty much the same for other authors \u2013 is because of the delight of storytelling, and because the stories are just there \u201cin the air\u201d and demand to be told. But because writing is <\/em>a very solitary occupation, being shortlisted, let alone winning, an award is a tremendous affirmation that you are, through those solitary endeavours, connecting with a world of reader, most of whom you have never met.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, to paraphrase US author Brad Beaulieu from a recent SF Signal discussion on this very topic:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAwards make us strive to be better. They push our fiction to achieve more\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In the same discussion, reviewer and critic Karen Burnham observed that<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we give an award to a person or a piece of work, we\u2019re saying \u201cYes, this! Please write more awesome stuff like this!\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Shelley\"<\/a>In terms of the \u201c awesome stuff\u201d we are here to celebrate today, I consider it significant that we had finalists and winners in two important but distinct areas of literary endeavor. The first is creation of the works of literature themselves \u2013 in this case comprised in the three distinct literary forms of novel, novella, and short story.<\/span><\/p>\n

The importance of this field is unquestionable and well-recognized: so much so that the Sir Julius Vogel Awards have individual categories for the Novel, for which Tim Stead was a finalist, and for the Novella and Short Story respectively \u2013 and Shelley Chappell was a finalist in both these latter categories, as well as for Best Collected Work.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, Tim Stead, Shelley Chappell and A.J. \u2013 Amanda \u2013 Fitzwater were all shortlisted for the prestigious Best New Talent Award. I believe it is a significant achievement that three of the six finalist spots were gained by Christchurch writers. And of course we\u2019re all delighted that Amanda brought the award home to the \u201ccity that shakes\u201d \u2013 in this case with foot-stamping applause!<\/span><\/p>\n

The second, very important area of literary endeavour lies in what the Sir Julius Vogel Awards term \u201cFan Writing.\u201d We are not, however, talking about the phenomenon known as fan fiction, but the complementary field of review, criticism, interviews, essays and reflection\u2014an area in which our Christchurch finalist, and ultimately Award winner, Rebecca Fisher has established an international as well as a local track record.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope you will all agree with me in concluding that as a community of writers and readers, we have a great deal to celebrate today—and will join me in warmly congratulating Amanda and Rebecca, Tim and Shelley.”<\/span><\/p>\n

~ Helen Lowe, 13 June 2015<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I was honoured to deliver the keynote address at an event celebrating Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award Winners. I’ll be reporting more fully on the event tomorrow, but for now, I’ll share the address: . “I am delighted and honoured to be part of today\u2019s event \u2013 for several reasons. The first is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,50,20,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-what-im-doing","category-about-writing","category-events","category-other-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29330"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29335,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29330\/revisions\/29335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}