18 Apr 2018

Volcano by Mia Gaudin

From the collecton Short Stories

Mt Eden, late afternoon. The sun is setting, the champagne is flowing, relationships are shifting and Sarah is forced to consider her own mortality.

Told by Marguerite Tait-Jamieson

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Photo: Used with permission

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Photo: Mia Gaudin

Mia Gaudin grew up in central Auckland and began writing earnest teenage poetry when she was an earnest teenager. Despite early encouragement and accolades (she was the winner of the inaugural National Schools Poetry Award in 2003), she threw it all in to spend the next 12 years gaining an LLB(Hons) degree and working as a lawyer in Wellington. During those years she also completed a BA in English and Art History, and found some success being published by Hue & Cry, Express Media, Mimicry, Pantograph Punch, The New Zealand Listener, Learning Media and The London Reader.

After her mother died in 2015, Mia started to peel away from the rutted path of courtroom lawyering and financial stability. She bought a one way ticket to Rome, hitched around Europe, planted tomatoes in Tuscany, became an artist’s model in Lyon, and spent a lot of time thinking about writing. After returning to New Zealand to earn some money, she enrolled in the MA at the IIML and wrote a novel about a family in grief and crisis.  

She is the recipient of the 2018 Winston Churchill McNeish Writer’s Fellowship which has provided her with funding to visit California and Mexico to research her next writing project.

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