This year’s issue of literary journal Turbine is now online and can be viewed at www.vuw.ac.nz/turbine.
Published by Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and guest-edited by Master’s students Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, M. Doyle Corcoran and Gregory Kan, Turbine 12 includes work by emerging and established writers from New Zealand and beyond.
A highlight of the journal is an excerpt and audio recording from Lamplighter, the enthralling novel by newly announced Adam Foundation Prize 2012 winner Kerry Donovan-Brown, but the literary riches don’t stop there.
A generous selection of new fiction and poetry offers grit, surprise and delight. Seed-clouds ripple inside the blood, music falls from back pockets, and a heart turns to mud. Stories about children provoke second thoughts on procreation, and times spent on the Jersey shore or the jellyfish-rich waters off Japan might provide readers with an early summer vacation. Back in the nonfictional world, Ashleigh Young attends a conference on boredom.
The issue also features an interview with prize-winning Young Adult writer Bernard Beckett, this year’s Victoria University Writer in Residence, where he provides an inside scoop on his upcoming work. Another highlight is the long, poignant sequence of poems from former poet laureate Michele Leggott, who tells us ‘there is language for everything but the cost is unspeakable’. And there’s a German translation of James Brown’s poem, ‘I come from Palmerston North’— an unexpected by-product of New Zealand’s closer literary relations with Germany in 2012, the result of our guest-of-honour status at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The ‘Reading Room’ offers insight into the rigours of the IIML’s Master of Arts in Creative Writing via excerpts from student reading journals—one writer likes to procrastinate by reading about Mt Everest; another notes the implausible good looks of a visiting poet. Twenty of this year’s IIML Master’s students have work on display, along with a scattering of graduates and a handful of rising stars from the United States and Australia.
Senior Lecturer Chris Price says, “Turbine has frequently introduced exciting new writers who have gone on to publish acclaimed books and I’m sure this year is no exception. We’ll be hearing a lot more from many of these writers in years to come.”