A Scotland-based novelist has won the University of Otago's 2004 Robert Burns Fellowship. Kate Duignan, who is based in Edinburgh, will return to Dunedin to work on a new novel, set in Edinburgh and Dunedin in contemporary and historic times.

Duignan received a Schaeffer Fellowship in 2001, and the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary in 2002. She published her acclaimed first novel Breakwater in 2001, and has written several other pieces of short fiction.