A former physiotherapist turned writer is the recipient of the 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.
Poet, essayist and novelist Sue Wootton will travel to Menton, in the south of France, next year to work on her sixth poetry collection – but first she has a PhD and second novel to finish.
While it sounds like a mountain of work, Dunedin-based Wootton says the PhD and novel fit together.
Wootton is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Scottish and Irish Studies and in the Department of General Practice (Medicine).
"My thesis title is 'Life sentences: articulating recoveries in poetry and prose', and I'm looking at how literary explorations of mobility and immobility offer resources for well being in real life," she says.
Wootton received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 2003, and published her first selection of poetry, Hourglass, in 2005. In 2008, Wootton was awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship by the University of Otago.