Bill Manhire has very graciously sent a postcard to our readers from Menton, in the south of France. He’s the current holder of the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, and is spending six months at the Villa Isola Bella. Over to you, Bill:

"We’ve been here since 13 April, with a couple of trips away. The first was a week in Verona for a colloquium on the New Zealand and Australian and South Pacific short story. Other writers present were Patricia Grace, Sia Fiegel, Lydia Wevers, Kate Grenville, and Frank Moorhouse. The New Zealand writers covered themselves in glory, but of course literature itself won on the day.

"The second away-trip was to London to, ahem, review the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet. And this weekend I’m off to Toronto for the final judging of the Griffin Poetry Prize. It was exhausting enough producing shortlists from about 450 entries back in February and March. One day next week Phyllis Webb, Billy Collins, and I go into a locked room and don’t come out till we have a couple of Can$40,000 winners. The awards are announced the same night.

"The Katherine Mansfield Room in Menton is actually the old gardener’s room/shed in the basement of the Villa Isola Bella. In other words, KM herself lived upstairs in proper comfort. But upstairs is currently being turned into five very flash own-your-own apartments, so soon all that will remain is the view she had and, of course, the work she wrote here – which includes one of the great short stories of all time, Daughters of the Late Colonel.

"I suppose most people know that Mansfield made a big mistake coming to Menton for her health. The local climate in fact did her more harm than good. The old graveyard here is full of British and Russian visitors, most aged between 18 and 35, who came here for the imagined benefits of the climate. William Webb Ellis, the man who is supposed to have invented rugby is buried here, and like Katherine Mansfield has a local street named after him. The young Aubrey Beardsley died here, too.

"I find when I’m in the KM room that I’m less conscious of Mansfield than I am of the 33 New Zealand writers who have been here before me, including some – like Michael King, Janet Frame, and Allen Curnow – who are now powerful spirit presences. They’re amiable ghosts, I think, but they set a high standard. Because of the happy workers upstairs at the Isola Bella, I’ve been mostly working in our apartment, which is a 45-minute walk away from the KM Room, but has been lived in by NZ writers since Nigel Cox first lived here in 1991. But I plan to start keeping the Riviera equivalent of office hours there soon.

"I’ve spent most of my writing time completing the notes and introduction for an anthology, The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica, which VUP will publish later this year. It’s odd to be preoccupied with fiction and poetry about ice in such a warm environment. I finished the intro this week, and celebrated with a four-hour walk along the coast to Monaco. I hope this sounds wildly cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Antarctica done with, I’m hoping that the poems which come will have a slightly different music to them, if only because the soundscape here, being French, is so different. How do they make those noises?

"Menton is a slow-paced sort of place, too. It promotes itself as ‘the secret Riviera’ – I suppose because it lacks the glamour and bustle of nearby resorts like Nice and Cannes. But its pace is the kind of pace that suits writers, or the kind of writer I am, very well indeed. That’s as long as you can keep clear of the hundreds of yapping little dogs, with solitary ladies attached, and the hundreds of yapping motor scooters.

"They also make a great thing about citrus here. There’s a local legend that Eve, after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, planted a lemon tree in Menton for somewhat obscure nostalgic reasons. Or so say the guidebooks, keen to promote the annual February lemon festival. I also like the occasional, slightly oblique excursions into English that you see on local shopfronts. My current favourite, the name of the business, is ‘NO KILL PECHE’. It turns out to be a shop with a window crammed with fishing rods. This would be just the place for Brian Turner."