11/03/24
Happy Birthday Katherine Mansfield – one hundred and thirty six years young this month!
In her journal, she wrote “To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.” When Mansfield died, aged just thirty-four, Virginia Woolf described her contemporary as both her “bitter opponent and beloved friend — unrivalled by any other.”
Katherine Mansfield House & Garden in Wellington / Pōneke has just hosted the 2024 At the Bay / I Te Kokuru Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Prize. The theme this year was haunted for fiction of 1888 words (marking the year of Mansfield’s birth) – and my We Start and End with Family was commended.
You can read my story and the other finalists here. Thanks to the At the Bay team…and a little bird tells me that Harry Ricketts read for me with wonderful pacing and humour – thanks Harry!
