‘for it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows, materially and intellectually’
Charles Brasch, ‘Notes’. Landfall, March, 1959

This year, 2018, is the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. It is the oldest and most prestigious literary art award in New Zealand. There is some mystery surrounding the people who helped set it up, but Dunedin’s own Charles Brasch certainly had a hand in it; it is thus fitting that many of the books on display come from his own collection, which is housed in Special Collections.

On the 7^th of September the exhibition, Auld Acquaintances: Celebrating the Robert Burns Fellowship, will begin in the de Beer Gallery, Special Collections at the University of Otago. It will run through until the 7^th of December.

The Robert Burns Fellowship was established as a way to foster nascent or already established New Zealand writing talent. Poets, novelists, short story writers, historians, scriptwriters, playwrights, essayists – no genre is excluded. Many of New Zealand’s most well-known writers have been Robert Burns Fellows – Maurice Gee, Janet Frame, James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, Roger Hall, Cilla McQueen, Michael King, Laurence Fearnley…the list goes on.

All of the Robert Burns Fellows will feature in the exhibition. Many of them have written their own paragraphs on how the Fellowship has impacted their lives, making the exhibition a very personal one. In addition and where possible, the publication that resulted from the Fellow’s tenure is on display. From the novelist Ian Cross – first ever Fellow in 1959 – to the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018, poet Rhian Gallagher, this exhibition is a piece of New Zealand’s literary history that everyone needs to see.

For a full roster of other events associated with the Burns Fellowship reunion, see the Department of English and Linguistics’ site.

The Centre for the Book is delighted to join with the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival and UBS and other sponsors to bring Shaun Bythell to Dunedin to recount his adventures as an irreverent bookseller.  The event is ticketed and tickets are available from UBS for $20, though for fans of Trainspotting a joint ticket to hear Shaun and Irvine Welsh both on the same day is available for $30.  It should prove a very engaging Sunday afternoon and evening with two lively authors with quite distinctive voices.  We do hope you can join us.

Shaun’s talk will be held at the Hutton Theatre, Otago Museum at 2 pm on Sunday, 2 September.  Ticket information and more details available on the DWRF website.