- Location: St Enochs Church, 12 Centennial Ave, Alexandra
- Start Date: Friday 6th Dec, 2024.
- End Date: Friday 6th Dec, 2024.
- Time: 10.00am - 12.00pm.
- 1 Weeks.
- 2 hours per week.
U3A Alexandra Laurence Fearnley Novelist
A. First Hour
To the Mountains: The pleasure of researching and editing an anthology of New Zealand mountaineering writing.
B. Second Hour
The Pull of the South: An overview of Laurence Fearnley's South Island Novels and the Importance of Southern Voices.
Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer. Her novel The Hut Builder won the fiction category of the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards. In 2014 her novel Reach was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and, in 2008, Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Following her PhD researching New Zealand mountaineering-writing, she
co-edited, with Paul Hersey, an anthology of New Zealand mountain writing To the Mountains, in 2018. In 2004 Fearnley was awarded the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship and in 2007 the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2016 she won the NZSA/ Janet Frame Memorial Award and in 2017 she was the joint winner of the Landfall essay competition. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2019 and won the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship in 2023. In 2024 she was invited to take up the Henderson House Residency in Alexandra. She lives in Dunedin.
