Two snippets of news from the Victoria University centre of the International Institute of Modern Letters. And surprise surprise, it’s yet more awards. (At this time of year, New Zealand seems to have more awards than writers.)

The winner of the 2004 Glenn Schaeffer Award, which takes one of Victoria's top creative writing students to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has just been announced. She is novelist Tracey Hill, who will take up the US$20,000 award in September.

Tracey's first degree was in Politics and Philosophy, and she was the winner of the 1995 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Novice Writer's Award. During her enrolment in Victoria's MA in Creative Writing she worked on a novel, Fool's Cap, about life on a fictional, almost perfectly round island. Previous recipients of the Glenn Schaeffer Award are novelist Paula Morris and poet Anna Livesey.

And secondly:

The Prize in Modern Letters is moving into its final judging phase. US director of the IIML, Eric Olsen, has convened a panel of three judges to decide the winner, who will receive the $60,000 award during Writers and Readers Week. The judges for the 2004 Prize in Modern Letters are Sandra Cisneros, Douglas Unger, and Geoffrey Wolff.

The Saturday 13 March award ceremony is free and open to the public. Please come along! It begins at 5.15 p.m. at the Westpac St James Theatre, Courtenay Place. The shortlisted authors - William Brandt, Kate Camp, Glenn Colquhoun and Geoff Cush - will earlier be reading their work at the Heineken Festival Club, 12.10 - 1.00 p.m., on Thursday 11 March. Catherine Chidgey, inaugural winner of the Prize in Modern Letters, will chair the reading.