Tramper, software engineer, and essayist, Rose Lu will be using her six months at Randell Cottage to write her first novel.

Currently untitled, the project follows the story of Moon, a second-generation Chinese-New Zealander, and Hsiao-Han, who migrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in her mid-twenties.

A graduate of the Master of Creative Writing workshop at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters, Lu’s first book was the 2019 essay collection All Who Live On Islands, winner of the IIML’s 2018 creative non-fiction writing prize.

Of her project, she says: “I want this book to be divorced from the expectation that POC are thinking about their race in relation to a Pākehā majority, by having the primary dialogue be between Chinese and Taiwanese characters. I also want to challenge mainstream notions of representation. We all have complicated relationships to home, family and language, and I want to write a story set across different times and generations to explore that.”

 

Further reading

• Read Rose’s Residency report