NZSA CompleteMS recipients 2024
Shelley Burne-Field
Shelley Burne-Field writes fiction of all sorts including short fiction, articles, and poetry. Her first novel for children, Brave Kahu and the Pōrangi Magpie was published by Allen and Unwin in May 2024 and she is the Emerging Māori Writer in residence at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University 2024. She was the New Zealand finalist in the 2022 Short Story Commonwealth Prize.
Victoria Cleal
Victoria Cleal is an editor and writer in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has also lived in the King Country, Tāmaki Makaurau, Japan, London, and Sydney. Victoria has written two picture books for Te Papa Press: Lost in the Museum (2022) and Whiti: Colossal Squid of the Deep (2020), winner of the Best Children’s Book category at the 2021 Whitley Awards for zoological literature. She is excited that her first middle-grade novel will be further developed through the NZSA CompleteMS programme.
Sally Forman
Sally emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand, from England, in 2011. She lives in the Ida Valley in the Māniatoto, in Central Otago. She’s been a netball player, a teacher, a backpacker, a psychotherapist, life coach and creative non-fiction and science writing student. If she isn’t hiking, you can almost always find her landscaping her garden, or bird watching.
‘Horace, hens and me. A meditation on a life with chickens’ is a multi-stranded project — love story, immigration, autobiography, ‘domestic’ account (establishing home and garden), personal growth and understanding of self, human use of animals and the land and our increasing disassociation from both, and the tender and often-harrowing focus on chooks. Grateful to be a recipient of the CompleteMS Assessment, Sally is looking forward to the assessor’s perspective on this manuscript.
PK Granger
PK Granger writes fiction from her sunroom in Ōtautahi. A graduate of Hagley Writers’ Institute, her work has appeared in the Institute’s The Quick Brown Dog journal, Flash Frontier and takahē. She is currently working on a Young Adult series and is excited and grateful to be a CompleteMS Programme recipient. The NZSA manuscript assessment will help her to complete her first novel.
Sarah Johnson
Sarah Johnson lives in Whaingaroa Raglan, where she works as a freelance writer and editor, and as an author of fiction and non-fiction books and stories for children, young people and adults. She is deeply grateful to receive an assessment under the NZSA’s CompleteMS Assessment Programme, and is looking forward to working with the assessor to get her manuscript, ‘Not a Babe’ into shape. ‘Not a Babe’ is the first YA novel Sarah has attempted.
Nick Marsden
Nick Marsden is a West Auckland based writer. He is the author of Shedding Skin, (Penguin NZ 2005) a novel about a dodgy Auckland English language school located above a massage parlour. He has also published one or two ESOL resource books. He studied for a Masters in Creative Writing (MCW) at Auckland University and he enjoys escapades of early morning writing. He is delighted to have the opportunity to receive an informed appraisal of his novel through the NZSA’s Complete Manuscript Assessment Scheme.
Samantha Oakley
Samantha has lived in New Zealand for fifteen years, but spent most of her childhood in England and moved to Japan as a young adult to learn Japanese and explore her cultural heritage. Her Japanese-British ancestry has been a powerful influence on her writing to date. She has very recently completed a Master of Creative Writing at Massey University, and become the managing editor for Headland online journal. Outside of writing, she works in the public sector and lives in Wellington with her husband and two children. Samantha has been working on a speculative fiction novel, and is both honoured and delighted to be a recipient of the NZSA CompleteMS Assessment.
Tammy Pegg
Tammy has twenty-five years of working in frontline medicine. After five years working as a junior doctor in the NHS she took a much-needed break to complete a PhD at Oxford, working with one of the UK’s leading cardiothoracic surgeons. Her research was a finalist for the American Heart Association prize in cardiothoracic surgery. In 2008 she moved to New Zealand and now works as a cardiologist in Nelson and Marlborough. In 2021 she took a post with Te Tāhū Hauora- The Health and Quality Safety Commission of New Zealand as the clinical lead for Advance Care Planning; initiating a national conversation on CPR in hospitals. Although her research is well published, this is her first toe dip into creative writing. She feels honoured to have been award the NZSA complete MS programme for her collated stories of resuscitation in the modern era.
Emma Ling Sidnam
Emma Ling Sidnam is a Wellington-based writer and slam poet. Her debut novel ‘Backwaters’ (Text Publishing) won the Michael Gifkins Prize and was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Emma has been published in the Spinoff, Capital, Newsroom and the anthologies A Clear Dawn and Middle Distance. She is currently working on a collection of short stories which won the Surrey Residency, and a new novel. Outside of writing, she is interested in running, portrait photography, languages, music, and attempting to make sense of the symphony that is life. Instagram – @emmasidnam
Paul Simei-Barton
Paul Simei-Barton works as a high school teacher in West Auckland, writing whenever he can. Several of his stage plays have been produced at New Zealand theatres, he has writing credits for short film scripts & TV drama, and for 14 years was a theatre reviewer for the NZ Herald. The manuscript submitted to the NZSA CompleteMS Manuscript Assessment Programme is his first attempt at a novel, a historical fiction exploring the extraordinary circumstances that brought the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper to Canterbury College, Christchurch in the 1930’s.
Bernard Steeds
Bernard’s work has appeared in the short story collection Water, and in many journals and anthologies including (most recently) The Penguin New Zealand Anthology: Fifty Stories for Fifty Years in Aotearoa. He is twice winner of the Sunday Star Times Short Story Prize, and also won the 2022 At the Bay Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition.
Michelle Tayler
Michelle Tayler lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her short story Jackie was included in Metro magazine’s summer short story selection and she has had two pieces of fiction published in literary magazine Sport. In 2023 and 2024 her stories were shortlisted for the international Folly journal short story prize and She Leaves will be published in Folly .002 She is excited by, and immensely grateful to NZSA and Creative New Zealand for this opportunity.
Kit Willett
Kit Willett is a bisexual poet and English teacher from Tāmaki Makaurau. He is the executive editor of Aotearoa online poetry journal Tarot, which aims to be an aesthetic and accessible magazine of diverse voices, and secretary of the Auckland branch of the NZSA. Kit’s debut poetry collection Dying of the Light (Wipf & Stock, 2022) was the product of his Master of Creative Writing through AUT, completed in 2020. His work has most recently appeared in Landfall, Eunoia Review, and a fine line. Links to journals and anthologies including Kit’s work can be found on his website: tarotpoetry.nz/kit. He is grateful to have his poetry manuscript assessed through this programme.
Creative New Zealand has supported NZSA’s mentorship & assessment programmes for 30 years and NZSA is grateful for their continued patronage.