'WRITE SPOT’, OAR FM: DUNEDIN’S TULIP MEETS A PRINCE

Posted: Thursday Jul 07, 2022

Every fortnight on our partner OAR FM’s OARsome Morning Show, Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature’s WriteSpot celebrates our wonderful writers of fiction and non-fiction, poets, oral storytellers, playwrights, screenwriters, lyricists, graphic novelists, and picture book authors and illustrators.

This week on the show we celebrated Ōtepoti Dunedin author Emma Wood’s success when news broke that Aotearoa New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had gifted Tulip and Doug:A Spud-Tacular Friendship Story to the Duke of Cambridge during a recent meeting at Kensington Palace in London. Emma said the news made for an exciting start to her Sunday morning.

‘It was a pretty good start to the day, to see that!’

She described the book as being about an adventurous young girl Tulip and her friend Doug, a potato. It is an ill-fated relationship, as potatoes are not known to be long-lived, which was partly what the story was about.

Listen here as Emma recounts her magical week, and shares insights into the special relationship between writer and illustrator as the words come to life visually on the page:

Write Spot with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature (accessradio.org)