Prizewinner

Bayswater author Josie Shapiro is in for a big year – and the next two weeks at the Michael King Writers Centre are key to it.

She will work on her second novel at the centre, on the slopes of Takarunga, as she steadies her nerves about the publishing of her first.

“Being local and being able to stay there is really exciting,” she tells the Flagstaff.

It means if needs be she can pop home and see how her two young daughters are doing – or better yet, she can meet them and her husband in Devonport. “I don’t feel like I’m abandoning anybody.”

But she also has visions of writing in peace, getting up early and working late, with visits to the village for coffee, or perhaps an evening glass of wine. “It is really going to be freeing for my creative mind.”

Her stay under an emerging writer’s residency award begins next week. Shapiro says it will be a welcome distraction from nervous excitement about her first book going to the printer in late February for a New Zealand launch in May. It is likely to attract plenty of attention: the manuscript for the book has already won the inaugural Allen & Unwin Commercial Fiction Prize.

Shapiro, who was born in Australia and grew up in New Plymouth, says: “I’m one of those people who wanted to write from when I was a little kid.”

Always a keen reader, she wrote stories