Creative Writing > Congratulations

Nicola Kimpton

Congratulations to creative writing tutor Jenny Argante who has won this year's Timaru Rose Festival Poetry Award with a rhymed poem, 'Domestic Jungle'. Judge Jan Hill said of the poem:

“The winner stood out: it was a well-worked poem with an appealing sustained metaphor and a surprise ending. Furthermore, it had a clever rhyming system which was not obvious on first reading. The more I got into the poem, Domestic Jungle,  the more it involved my senses.  I could hear the sound of cat-feet tracking on the corded tread, I could see the sand-ribbed carpets. I was breathing the steamy air, and walking through the jungle in the dimly filtered light. I could smell the aromatic peat and hear the tom-tom beat of the pots and pans in the kitchen. I was delighted to come across the shabby ape in his study-cage and see the picaninnies splashing in the water-hole before they trekked to bed. The night creeps closer, ominous and dread and at last the parents, with feral grunts are free to couple warm with sweat / inside their jungle paradise. And thus we return nicely to the theme expressed at the beginning of the poem.”

Jenny’s prize is this year's 'Timaru rose' and a cheque for $300. Jenny says, "I am giving the rose to two young writer friends who have just set up home together, so as to inspire them. The cheque I am keeping to inspire myself."

Nicola Kimpton, winner of the inaugural Kingi McKinnon Scholarship for Emerging Writers 2007, has a few notches in her writing belt. Success in writing competitions has been combined with success in publishing non-fiction articles, and with acceptance into highly regarded story anthologies.

Just some of Nicola’s successes are:

• Prize winner in the Whakatane Short Story Competition (2007)
• Runner up in the Rotorua Short Story Competition (2008)

• short, a collection of interesting short stories
  edited by Lili Wilkinson
  black dog books
• THE NEW ZEALAND BOOK OF THE BEACH 2
  Selected & introduced by Graeme Lay
  David Ling Publishing

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