The residency, which includes six rent-free months in an historic cottage in Thorndon, Wellington, plus a $32,000 stipend to cover expenses, was due to start in July.
Now, the Randell Cottage Trust Fellowship is urgently crowdfunding after “more than 20 years of a close and valued working relationship with Creative NZ”.
On its website, the trust says: “Citing limited funding availability, Creative NZ has pulled its grant for the fellowship stipend as of 2025. This decision applies for the next three-year funding cycle.”
As of Tuesday, the trust had raised close to $14,500 of the $16,500 it was currently seeking via arts crowdfunding platform Boosted.
De Silva said without the residency, “I’ll probably have to get a part-time job and be juggling writing my novel with working hospo or retail or stringing together some freelance gigs and making it work”.
Residencies help make books better, said de Silva.
“That’s how you get the work done. It is just so, so hard juggling other jobs, other commitments and writing a novel. You need thinking and dreaming time as well as that just hardcore writing time.
“It is very worrying that at age 34, attached to a prestigious, competitive, and established residency, I’m part of a Boosted campaign to be able to go and do this residency. It’s not good.”
De Silva’s debut novel Amma made the longlist for the Jan Medlicott Acorn award for literature in this year’s Ockham Awards. The Sri Lankan Pākehā writer and creative, based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, found out last month that Amma had also been longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (a British-based award, most recently won by V. V. Ganeshananthan, Barbara Kingsolver and Ruth Ozeki).
“The book has achieved international success and yet I can’t continue writing in the country that I live and work in?
“There are so many novelists here who write in between a thousand other things and they are on these lists. It should embarrass our Government. It needs to be different.”
In her email to supporters, de Silva said she was feeling “first-hand” the effects of funding cuts in the current Government’s first budget. In May 2024, Government announced a savings package of $42.2 million over four years for Vote Arts, Culture and Heritage (equating to a 3% baseline reduction).
At the time, Creative NZ stressed it had not received a reduction but would be operating with approximately $17m less in the coming year because one-off Covid-19 funding was ending. It warned there had been a rapid increase in demand for contestable grants and if that trend continued it would “see a significant drop in the number of successful applicants”.
De Silva, who holds a degree in performing and screen arts from Unitec Institute of Technology, a Masters of Creative Writing from University of Auckland and has worked as a writer on television’s Shortland Street, said she could not recall previously having to seek money via a Boosted campaign.
“I don’t want artists to get used to fighting over crumbs.”
Aotearoa New Zealand was losing its creative talent because artists could not afford to live here, de Silva claimed, citing writers who had recently moved to Melbourne, Australia, or chose to work out of Britain.
“New Zealanders do read books by writers from Aotearoa and obviously people internationally do as well, but the Government is not reinforcing, supporting or developing us.”
De Silva (who has spent the past year eking out two separate grants) said it was “enraging” to hear Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, speaking at the likes of writers’ festivals and book awards.
“The audacity to deliver any kind of speech in front of people who can’t practise what they’re good at because of your policy?
“We have artists that are ready to make amazing work ... we’re not going to be able to see that if we don’t fund their work. Because people get tired, and people choose different lifestyles after a period of time. They want to do basic things like have families.
“And a lot of the time you can’t do that if you are going from residency to residency, from this fund to that fund, barely scraping by and having to look around every six months to see how you’re going to be able to manage the next phase of your career. We are wasting the people we have by not funding them.”
Goldsmith today responded to criticism saying “of course, there will always be disappointment from those that do not receive funding through Creative New Zealand’s competitive rounds, however, as a Crown entity, it makes its decisions independently from the Government”.
He reiterated there had been no cuts to the entity’s baseline funding, and said “in terms of the wider reductions the majority was made up of funding of the Ministry [for Culture and Heritage] itself, which was designed to return its funding to pre-Covid levels”.
Commenting on the loss of funding for the Randell Cottage fellowship and the literature sector’s wider struggle to maintain adequate support, Dame Fiona Kidman (author and Randell Cottage Trust founding trustee), said the help she had received to build on her earlier works, including a Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in France, had been crucial to her career.
“It is a true gift for an emerging writer to have a quiet space free of day-to-day pressures in which to develop their craft.”
Poet Hinemoana Baker, the most recent Randell Cottage resident, said she was “deeply troubled” to hear the trust would need to find other funding for the coming three years.
“There are other residencies in the country, and indeed in the world, but so few have the combination of unique offerings that Randell Cottage does.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on the lifestyle desk.
