For all of us who are curious about the process of writing and want to know more about what comes next for writers and sometimes takes many years before we can find those labours of love on our library shelves, we have invited author and 2017 Burns Fellow Craig Cliff together with Mākaro Press publisher and author Mary McCallum to join us at the Central Library. They will be discussing how the editing and publishing process works drawing on their own experiences.
Craig Cliff, author of A Man Melting: Short stories and The Mannequin Makers will be the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University in 2017. He hopes to be as prolific as he was in 2008, when he set himself the goal of writing a million words in a year (and blogged about it at www.yearofamillionwords.blogspot.com). He only wrote 800,767 words in the end, some of which can be found in his short story collection, A Man Melting, which won Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. His novel, The Mannequin Makers (2013), has been translated into Romanian and will come out in the U.S. next year.
Mary McCallum is an author turned publisher. She started up Mākaro Press in Wellington over three years ago and has already published 50 titles, mainly poetry and fiction, and some non-fiction including memoirs. Six titles have already been shortlisted for major awards. Mary is also the author of the award-winning, The Blue (Penguin 2007), a children’s novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish (Gecko 2014) and a chapbook of poetry The Tenderness of Light. Mary has reviewed books on National Radio for nearly 15 years, and has worked as a bookseller, creative writing tutor, broadcast journalist and TV presenter.
Eastbourne: 100 years was published in 2006 and includes one of McCallum’s essays.