In a week of events culminating on Sunday, October 12, more than 30 of these writers came together, to celebrate the past, discuss the present, and commemorate those who have passed on.
The celebration showed us the power of the written word and reminded us what the literary arts can do. Outside of birth and death, it is the arts, in this case the literary arts, that can summon the Event.
Literature can summon the dead.
The Saturday afternoon session "Bright in Memory", was, as the poet Cilla McQueen suggested, a channelling of deceased Burns fellows.
The room was full, not just with audience members and the writers on stage but also with the voices, stories and breaths of the dead.
Jo Randerson read a short story by Janet Frame; Brian Turner, poems from James K. Baxter; Bernadette Hall, an extract from Ruth Dallas; and Cilla McQueen and Christine Johnston read work from the two most recently departed, Hone Tuwhare and Dianne Pettis.
The exhibition in the de Beer Gallery at the University Library (on display until December 21) performs a complementary kind of summoning.
The items on display - books, manuscripts, prints, notebooks - somehow don't seem like dead relics.
Even the earliest objects, like the first edition of Ian Cross' 1958 The God Boy, or a 1967 typescript of James K. Baxter's The Lion Skin, are still very much of the present, still infused with a kind of living energy after all those decades.
Literature can be dangerous. The writers of the Saturday midday panel "The Writer as Political Animal", reminded us that writing can be anarchic, disgraceful, resistant.
Philip Temple talked about the pressure that comes from standing up for something like saving the kea from the farmer's shotgun, Lynley Hood recalled packing a bag for prison after refusing to hand over sources for her controversial book on the epic tragedy of Peter Ellis and the Christchurch creche case, and Ian Wedde talked about the merit of using satire and the importance of well-directed derision and reminded us that politics is a collective effort.
Brian Turner ended the session with a challenge: what New Zealand needs is for the New Zealand reader to pick up the political pace.
The idea that writing can embody the refusal to comply, resurfaced in the Sunday panel "Te Torino: At the same Time the Spiral is Going Out it is Returning".
Witi Ihimaera and Rawiri Paratene, respectively the writer and the actor of Whale Rider, showed us that writers can do other things, such as act, dance, sing and teach. They also reminded us that from the day we are born we begin telling stories but that stories are not always innocent and that sometimes they become an imposition.
Why couldn't Little Miss Muffet simply have said "kia ora" to the spider and placed him gently out of harm's way? The writer mysteriously named simply Renée, reminded us that literature can make us laugh, as she read a story about five cats and a southern man who were all called George.
Literature is a performance. Kerry Hulme almost missed her session "Te Torino".
She reminded us of the power of performance when, greeted by song, she walked slowly down the aisle; the most famous person in the room, half an hour late. Once there, she gave a brief, soft-spoken reading from her short story collection Stone Fish, frequently breaking away from the text to give comments and explanations.
In the moments when she was reading, her voice slipped into a gentle, mesmerising rhythm; an even flow of words, like tiny stones falling.
Hulme and fellow author Sam Hunt, as might be expected, exemplified writing as performance.
Over the course of the celebrations, both only attended two events, the unveiling of the Robert Burns memorial plaque (and concomitant photo shoot) and their own reading.
Hunt declared he would attend nothing that had speeches in it. The Rod Stewart of New Zealand letters, with his upturned collar, white suit and bulging tie, he never took his sunglasses off and we, the audience, would have wanted nothing less.
Literature can also electrify. Sunday morning's performance poetry session will probably stand out for many as one of the high points of the celebrations.
David Eggleton, whose performances usually range from electrifying to blazing inferno, was in fine form, a one-man orchestra of verbiage in which it was difficult to tell where the poem stopped and the man began.
Nick Ascroft lulled the audience into a false sense of security with his initial modesty, then bolted off into bizarre convulsions of language, hopping and skipping down weird paths of slang and syntax.
Cilla McQueen's style was more measured; mellow and poised, exquisitely articulated. In contrast, John Dickson was slow and wry, chewing his long, winding narratives like pieces of dry meat.
Last of all came Sam Hunt, afloat on a tide of words, a boat bobbing on his own surging recitation.
Emeritus Professor Colin Gibson, at the unveiling of the commemorative plaque in the Octagon on a bright, windy Friday evening, summed up the whole occasion perfectly.
The Burns Fellowship reminds us that literature is something created not just then - in the past - but also now.
As readers, these celebrations were a chance to see literature embodied, to hear the voices otherwise silent on the page, and to appreciate the scope of "New Zealand" writing - local and international, witty and grave, romantic and cynical, politically conscious and frivolous, quiet and exuberant.
The writers are postgraduate students at the University of Otago's English department.
