Bill Manhire, the famed director of Victoria University’s creative writing programme, has won the latest Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. After many years nurturing and developing New Zealand’s writers, Manhire can now take a well-deserved break. Thanks to Creative New Zealand and Meridian Energy, he’ll spend six months at the Villa Isola Bella - a two-storey house in the smart Garavan quartier of Menton, in the south of France.

The villa was Katherine Mansfield’s favourite working place, and Manhire plans to produce a new collection of poems while there. "I've always felt that poetry is the closest literary form to music,” he said. “So to be in France, where the everyday soundscape is going to be so different, is a very exciting prospect."

The original villa has been sold to an Italian developer, who has kept the three seaward facing walls and the terrace where Mansfield wrote. The villa has five apartments, worth around $600,000 each to buyers.