Vivienne Plumb: Creative NZ writer in Berlin

It's for the Creative NZ writer's residency in Berlin, the latest in several residencies that she has held as far as the universities of Iowa (2004) and Hong Kong (2006) as well as all around New Zealand. Recent publications of hers include As Much Gold as an Ass Could Carry, a collection of her poetry, plays and short prose that was launched at the LA Book Fair in February 2017: her Diary as a Positive in Female Adult Behavior has been translated into Polish, and her plays are performed around the world. It's writing that highlights the fantastic and miraculous in everyday experience, and she has won numerous awards for it, from the 1998 NZ Poetry Society International Poetry prize to the Bruce Mason award. She also has a love for secrets. Her first novel was entitled Secret City (2003) and on this residency she is investigating her mother's secret life in Germany as a young woman, in the years before the second world war - a secret that not even her own family knew about…