The diary’s filling up.

The Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival is looking very tempting, with Rachael King and Jenny Pattrick joining forces in the English Flower Garden on Sunday 18 February, followed by Bill Manhire and Kate Camp (pictured) on Friday 23.

Heading further south, we see that the first ever New Zealand BookCrossing Convention is almost upon us – it’s on 16-18 February in Wellington, at West Plaza. For more details, email jacknjan@hotmail.com.

Also worth noting: the short story writer and novelist James George has been announced as this year’s Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow.

He’ll start his year-long tenure at the Sargeson flat near Auckland University this month, and also gets a $40,000 grant to allow him to focus full time on his writing.

George’s second novel, Hummingbird, was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards in 2004 and the Tasmania-Pacific Fiction prize in 2005. George says that he’ll use the fellowship to complete the final draft and editing of his fourth novel Theme from an Imaginary Western, and to undertake work on his fifth novel, Two Rivers. Both novels will be published by Huia Publishers.

On the subject of fellowships, the deadline for the Creative NZ Berlin Writer’s fellowship is Friday 9 February. Interested? This is what they’re looking for:

The successful applicant must be able to undertake the residency between August 2007 and July 2008. The primary aim of this Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency will be for the writer to work on an approved project while in Berlin. On returning, the writer will be expected to have completed, or substantially completed, a body of writing, and should be able to demonstrate other tangible benefits to New Zealand literature.

Check this PDF for the criteria and an application guide.

And finally, Trout Press has put David Howard’s acclaimed Shebang online for your perusal. When originally reviewed by Kapka Kassabova in the Listener five years ago, she said

Howard’s greatest lyrical power is in apprehending the elusive. His is a poetry of the vanshing, of the shifting elsewhere, of loss lurking within the moment. It is a poetry that, to rephrase the author, always lives in autumn.

Which reminds me. Daylight Savings will be gone soon, and the leaves will be turning brown. Where did that summer go?