Jillian Sullivan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jillian Sullivan | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 (age 68–69) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Website | |
| jilliansullivan | |
Jillian Sullivan is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry and a creative writing teacher. Her work has been published in New Zealand and overseas.
Jillian Sullivan was born in Masterton[1] in 1957.[2]
She has written novels and short stories for adults, children and teenagers, as well as creative non-fiction and poetry. Her work has been included in anthologies and published in journals such as Landfall, Takahē, North and South and Headland. She was awarded a Master of Creative Writing, with Distinction, at Massey University in 2011.[3][4][5]
After living in Nelson for many years, she moved to Oturehua in Central Otago. Her memoir A Way Home relates the story of how she achieved her dream to build a straw-bale house.[6][7][8]
She runs workshops at literary festivals[9] and teaches creative writing in New Zealand, in Rosemont College, Philadelphia[10] and at the Highlights Foundation, Pennsylvania.[11]
She has five children and nine grandchildren[1][4][12][13] and worked part-time for several years as a nurse aid at the Maniototo Hospital.[13][14][15]
Awards and Prizes
Jillian Sullivan was runner-up in the 2002 Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition.[2] She won the Tom Fitzgibbon Award in 2003 and the Maurice Gee Prize for Children’s Writing in 2005.[1]
She won the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2011[16] - this later leading to the publication of her book parallel,[4] as well as the 2016 Takahē Poetry Competition with her poem 'My Mother at the Edge of Town'.[17]
In 2017 she was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship to work on a collection of creative non-fiction essays with a conservation theme.[15][18]
In 2018, she won the Juncture Memoir Contest in America with her essay ‘Between Lands’,[19] and her essay ‘In the Midst of My True Life’ won the Best Non-fiction Bonus Prize in the 2018 Elyne Mitchell Writing Awards.[12][20] She was highly commended in the 2018 Warren Trust Awards for Architectural Writing.[21]
