NZSA CompleteMS recipients 2025
Jacqui Gregory
Jacqui Gregory is a childhood bookworm who dreamt of being a writer, but was persuaded by well meaning career’s advisors ‘to do something more sensible’, so by day she’s a clinical psychologist, and most of her writing has consisted of formal psychological reports.
Now she’s an older grownup (with fewer responsibilities and more time), she’s writing for fun again, and is thrilled and honoured that The Stories We Tell Ourselves has been chosen for a manuscript assessment with NZSA.
Virginia Green
Virginia Green pursued her fascination with early twentieth-century history to write Saving Nijinsky, a novel-length manuscript based on the tragic story of Vaslav Nijinsky, whose stardom with the Ballets Russes was equal to that of today’s top celebrities, and his equally talented but lesser known sister Bronia. Before switching to fiction, Virginia wrote biographies of notable business leaders, including Allan Hubbard, A Man Out of Time (Random House).
She grew up in Christchurch, spent most of her adult life in Wellington, Auckland and overseas (Tokyo, Geneva and the United States) before settling in Nelson. Thrilled to be a recipient of the CompleteMS Programme, Virginia looks forward to the assessor’s perspective on her manuscript.
Denise Harrison-Flett
Denise Harrison Flett’s storytelling highpoint — so far — was surviving the infamous Red Chair on The Graham Norton Show.
With a background in academic and research writing through her career in oncology nursing, Denise is now turning her hand to memoir. Semi-retired and following her roots, she lives in a small ski village in Québec, becoming the local Nordic Walking Instructor. Her debut memoir, Two French Villages, is the first in a two-book series exploring a Kiwi family’s experiences living in French-speaking villages — first in the south of France, and now in rural Québec. She is thrilled to be a recipient of the NZSA CompleteMS Assessment and looks forward to refining this work towards publication.
Kaye McLaren
Kaye McLaren lives and travels in a Toyota Hiace van fondly nicknamed the Drama Llama van, due to the large picture on the back of a rainbow llama with the words “Don’t be a Drama Llama”. She has so far not succeeded in taking her own advice. Kaye has been writing since age seven, so for 60 years at this point. She started with poetry, which she still writes. Her first book of poetry, called On the Road in a Van with a Dog was published last year under her Happy Black Dog imprint. Kaye writes adult fiction, children’s books, plays, TV scripts, memoirs, self help books, poetry, short stories and humorous travel stories. Her first book of the latter, called An Eel Swam up my Bum and Other Unlikely Tales, will be published this year. As unlikely as it seems, Kaye’s first full-length work of fiction, Sometimes the Prison is in You, is a literary novel containing almost no jokes.
Shelly McNee
At first Shelly might seem an unlikely candidate for this opportunity, as childhood dyslexia meant she struggled with reading and writing – even after high school.
Following a traumatic car accident at age 17, Shelly left her hometown of Hokitika and spent 19 years learning to live in and love the Australian wilderness. She also began to enjoy reading and writing at last, as well as photography, cooking and then parenting.
Over the last four years Shelly spent weekends and spare moments writing her first-ever book, which was really 40 years in the making: a memoir on raising her fearless, adventuresome toddler amongst the fascinating and dangerous Arnhem Land buffalo catching camps of the late 1980s.
As a determined and dedicated life-long learner, Shelly is delighted and grateful for this opportunity to further her manuscript, and step ever-closer to publishing and sharing her writing and photographs of that unusual time and place in Australian Outback history.
Bede Ngaruko
Bede is a Burundian-born engineer, interpreter, and broadcaster based in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2010. His writing explores themes of war, exile, memory, and identity, shaped by personal experience and a deep interest in justice. His debut memoir, Jungle Journal, retraces his journey from childhood in conflict-torn Burundi through refugee life across Africa to resettlement in New Zealand. He also works across four languages—English, French, Kirundi, and Swahili—as an interpreter and a content creator.
Gráinne Patterson
Gráinne Patterson is an Irish/tangata Tiriti writer and essayist living in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington. Her work predominantly explores trauma, healing, and the deep, rippling dynamics that are created in not-so-functional families. She sees her writing as an extension of her mind – a relentless search for connections between who we have been and who we are, and the uncomfortable truths hidden beneath the surface of our daily lives. She holds a Masters in Creative Nonfiction from the IIML, where she wrote the first draft of her memoir. She is deeply grateful to have support from the NZSA’s Complete Manuscript Assessment Programme to get her memoir to its next stage of development. Her essays have been published in The Spinoff and the bestselling Otherhood anthology (Massey University Press 2024).
Sarah Pratt
Sarah loves writing YA science fiction and fantasy, and dabbling in the occasional poem. She runs an aerospace engineering company by day and writes by night (well, early hours of the morning). She’s a rock climber, adores a good cup of coffee, and lives in Christchurch with her incredible husband and incredibly needy cats. Her first book, The 716, was published in 2022 and she’s excited that her second book will be honed under the guidance of this wonderful CompleteMS programme. Learn more about Sarah and her works at www.sjpratt.com
Tōrea Scott-Fyfe
Tōrea Scott-Fyfe (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāi Pākehā) spends their summers doing conservation work in Te Rua-o-te-Moko/Fiordland and their winters writing in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Their writing has been published in Headland, Turbine|Kapohau, The New Zealand Alpine Journal, and Huia Short Stories 15. They hold a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Tōrea is very grateful for the support of the CompleteMS Assessment Programme for their young adult novel, which weaves together pūrākau with their own experiences of place, wilderness, and belonging. They would also like to acknowledge Creative New Zealand, whose Early Career Fund enabled them to rework this manuscript to its current form.
Barbara Scrivens
Barbara Scrivens was born in England to Polish WW2 refugees and vividly remembers standing in a playground and not understanding any of the babble around her. Her first job as a reporter in a local newspaper led to her love of telling the stories of people who did not make the headlines.
Nearly 20 years ago, her mother sent her a poem, Red Night by Tolek Sobierajski and wrote “This is my story too” above it. It was the first time her mother had acknowledged her experiences in the forced-labour facilities in Siberian USSR, and led Barbara to meet other Poles in New Zealand, and publish their stories on her website Polish History New Zealand.
For the past 10 years she has wandered through graveyards all over New Zealand to find the nearly 1,000 Poles who arrived here between 1872 and 1883, and their many offspring. She is now turning some of her website stories and research into a book to acknowledge the 150 years since the first Poles arrived in Taranaki in 1876.
The title Too Many Consonants reflects the complication of being a Pole in an English-speaking world. Barbara is grateful for the opportunity, and thoroughly excited, at the prospect of having her work critically evaluated by the NZSA’s Complete MS programme.
Lisa Slavich
Lisa Slavich lives in Whangarei. She loves writing fiction, namely horror and supernatural fiction. Lisa has a major in Film, Television and Media from Auckland University and has worked in television for a number of years before moving back to Whangarei to raise her family. Watching her young son develop a passion for reading and storytelling reignited her love of writing. She is delighted to be chosen for the NZSA CompleteMS Manuscript Assessment Programme.
Annabel Wilson
Tangata Tiriti writer Annabel Wilson lives in Swannanoa. Her poetry has been published and performed in Aotearoa and overseas. Her works include No Science to Goodbye (RNZ 2017), Aspiring Daybook (Mākaro 2018), dusk & us (Ghost City Press 2024) and Making mixtapes with Seichan (ngā pukapuka pekapeka 2025). She holds a PhD in creative writing (Massey University 2023) in which she investigated hybrid forms of writing. Annabel is a regular performer at arts festivals and on the spoken word circuit.
annabelwilson.net
facebook.com/poeticobsession
annabelwilson.substack.com
@annabelwilsonwriter
Photo credit: Kate McKinlay
Anna Zam
Anna Zam is a West Auckland-based lawyer. As a young scholar, she attended undergraduate English lectures taught by Selina Tusitala-Marsh. After returning from Sydney, was inspired by her childhood hiking the Waitakere Ranges to understand the history of her home city and attempted her first manuscript as a result. She is humbled to receive support through the NZSA CompleteMS Manuscript Assessment Programme for this novel.