The past few days’ burning question has been: Would I still write this post if I hadn’t been an award recipient? Close behind it has been this Schrodinger follow-up: Would I still be an award recipient if I hadn’t decided the day before to attend the event? (Employees and families of employees of the organisers are not allowed to answer the second question.)
So, yeah, wow. Last Thursday I went along to the SWANZ awards, cheering for the competition because that was the only way I could deal with the pressure… and Goodbye My Feleni won. And the night itself, viewed in the preceding fortnight with dread and anxiety, turned out to be a very pleasant evening indeed.
I got to meet and talk with:
- playwrights Dean Parker and Briar Grace-Smith*;
- Unproduced Feature Film Script finalists Blair Soper and Simon McCarthy;
- big- and small-screen screenwriters Nick Ward, Kathryn Burnett, and James Griffin;
- producers Leanne Saunders, Tui Ruwhiu, Kath Akuhata-Brown, and Jeremy Macey;
- Commish exec Chris Payne, Motel director Todd Rippon, and Scriptease‘s Jane Sherning Warren;
- and fellow recipients Michael Bennett (Best Factual Script – The Confessions of Prisoner T), Daniel Joseph Borgman (New Writer Award), and Hone Kouka (NZWG Mentorship Award).
Ahh, networking. Not always as painful and dreadful as I imagine.
* I know they’re more than playwrights.
