Ian Wedde has been named as the winner of the 2005 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. He’ll be taking the place of incumbent Bill Manhire in the Villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote, in Menton (right), France.

Ian is an extremely significant literary chap in New Zealand. He’s written 12 volumes of poetry and three novels. Symmes Hole (1986) was his best known fiction and is remembered, in fact, as one of the most important novels of its decade. It had a double plotline, involving a 19th century whaler and a 20th century researcher.

Ian Wedde was quite busy in the 80s. He wrote all three of his novels, co-edited two big old Penguin anthologies of poetry and from 1983 to 1990 he was the art critic for the Evening Post in Wellington. It was from this that he began to move into combining literature with the arts by curating exhibitions and writing book-length catalogues to go with them.

Artists included Tony Fomison and Ralph Hotere, whom he met while protesting at Aramoana in the mid-70s. In fact, check out Ralph’s ‘Drawing for Ian Wedde’at the Ferner Gallery … phwoar, eh? The book Ralph Hotere: Black Light, of which Wedde was the general editor, won the Illustrative Arts section of the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Moving swifly onward, lest I become distracted by the delectable Ralph … for the last few years, Ian’s been head of humanities and of art and visual culture at Te Papa Tongarewa. He’s a Research Fellow at this and that university, Chairman of the Board of this and that arts council and moving image centre … And of course, he’s been a Burns Fellow and won all sorts of awards. For the full and humbling list, you must pop over to the Book Council site I’m afraid. But be warned, that’s quite an old (but groovy) rock’n’roll photo … if you want a newer one, check out his page at the nzepc.

His latest book of poetry was The Commonplace Odes in 2001. It had been eight years since his previous offering; it was eagerly awaited and well appreciated. There’s a poem from this book on the remarkable Jacket website (which incidentally is well worth a jolly good peruse and a bookmark too). The poems showed ‘a gravity and wisdom of an older man beginning to think about age and death and the passing of the generations’ but also ‘the enormous pleasure in the rich world of the senses’ according to a review at the time on the Auckland University Press website.

Another small excerpt from Odes shows perhaps that even then he had the germ of an idea of his next direction. It’s from To My Sons:

Home’s where you’re always going, it’s the place you’ve just
Left, where your father takes all the photographs
In the unfinished dwelling of the tribe.

His time in Menton will be spent working on a travel book exploring the question, ’Where are we when we’re at home?’ Ian said of the fellowship: ‘the timing is great – I’ve embarked on a journey to write a book about what home is, and the best way to do that is to go somewhere else.’ I know exactly what he means, and so do most Kiwis, I’m sure.