Final meeting of the Octagon Poets Collective for 2024 and Book Launch!

Ōtepoti Writers Lab, or ŌWL, as participants like to call it was, in the words of organiser H-J Kilkelly, ‘an all-genre, open access platform … supporting writers nationally to find connection, inspiration and a supportive environment to practice their craft’.  A writing space where facilitators set loose prompts, writers wrote what they liked and the community grew together.

Starting in person in 2019, the Writers Lab moved online during the height of the COVID pandemic and ran for five glorious years until just after Prospect Park Productions, ŌWL’s originator (run by H-J Kilkelly and Emily Duncan), shut up shop in 2024.

It could have ended there, but two of the facilitators, Eliana Gray and liz breslin, decided to put together a book of work produced during the five years of ŌWL sessions, and HOOT! words from the Ōtepoti Writers Lab community 2019–2024 is the result of that collaboration.

Featuring work from participants Jess Young, Elise Koncsek, Hana Pera Aoake (Ōtepoti Writers Lab Writer in Residence 2022), Ime Corkery, Martin Swann, Marina Lathouraki, Robyn Restieaux, Keri McMullan, Jade Young, Hera Cook, Tūī Krall, Nicola Brown, Martin Kean, Jasmine OM Taylor, Shannon Spencer, Sonya Duke, Laura Williamson, Angela Pope, Anne Marie Basquin, Grace Dalley, Elisabeth Denis and organisers and facilitators H-J Kilkelly, Eliana Gray, Rushi Vyas, liz breslin and Emer Lyons, the anthology is an archive and a treat containing work from both award winning writers and writers published here for the first time.

As editor Eliana Gray puts it, "this book is a true representation of the Ōtepoti Writers Lab: fun, creative, unexpected and bursting with talent."

HOOT! will be launched at the final meeting of the Octagon Poets Collective for 2024, which starts at 7pm on December 11th at the New Athenaeum Theatre.

The editors are very grateful to Dunedin City Creative Communities NZ, to Jenny Beck Law and to Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature for their support in the preservation and celebration of all that was ŌWL. Hoot hoot!  

For more information: editor@lizbreslin.com 0276225075