Our congratulations to Rachel O’Neill, the Randell Cottage New Zealand Writer-in-Residence in 2023, who has been awarded the prestigious Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. We have just had the pleasure of featuring Rachel as one of the guest readers at our annual Open Day, held as part of the Wellington Heritage Festival.

Rachel will spend the coming year living and working in Dunedin. They plan to develop narrative poems and prose poems for their fourth book of poetry, Master of the Female Half-Lengths, as well as beginning to outline and conduct research for their fifth book, a verse novel called Captured Stars, set in planetaria around the world.

Rachel says, “It is an honour to be the 2026 Robert Burns Fellow and I’m thrilled that I will be able to deepen and expand on select work sparked during my time at Randell Cottage, one of the most stimulating and inspiring residency experiences in my career to date. Living and working in Thorndon for six months enabled me to be responsive to the location and make site-responsive innovations in my practice. Furthermore, I was able to complete my third book at Randell Cottage, which has led to fruitful and ongoing collaborations, especially with local musicians and composers, all of which I’m excited to continue when I move to Ōtepoti next year”.