Well, what lovely serendipity there is to Vincent O’Sullivan being awarded the $100,000 Michael King Fellowship.

This used to be the Creative New Zealand Writers' Fellowship, which was established last year to fund senior writers over at least two years. The award has been renamed in recognition of the late Michael King, for his contribution to literature and his role in advocating for a major fellowship for New Zealand writers.

King and O’Sullivan go way back, and were mutually reverent. 'I first met Michael when I was working at Waikato University in the 1970s,' O’Sullivan recalls. 'At that time, he was a young reporter on the Waikato Times ... He was … remarkably selfless ... I can't think of any who did so much for his fellow writers.'

Meanwhile, O’Sullivan’s biography of New Zealand writer John Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border (Penguin), was described by King as 'a fine and scrupulous biography'. King concluded: 'I can't envisage a better or more deeply satisfying book being published in New Zealand this year.'

O’Sullivan has written novels, short stories, plays, biography; he is an editor and critic, and he has also just written his first opera, for goodness’ sake, with music by composer Ross Harris. His latest poetry collection, Nice morning for it, Adam (Victoria University Press), was published this year. One critic wrote that this latest volume 'shows O'Sullivan in superb form: he just keeps getting better'. He is completing the final volume of the five-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield.

The winner of many literary prizes, including the Montana New Zealand Book Awards for fiction and poetry, O'Sullivan was also the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton in 1994 and Director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University in 1997. He was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in 2000. He has also featured in LeafSalon a fair few times, which he’s no doubt terrifically chuffed about. Go on, do a quick search!

At the recent Writers and Readers' Week, held as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2004, O'Sullivan was asked by an audience member whether he was planning to write an autobiography. The writer's response was: 'Oh, I don't have the imagination for that.' Bless!

O’Sullivan plans to use the Fellowship to write a collection of short stories and two novels.