Eggleton also won the poetry category of the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards last year, with his collection The Conch Trumpet, published by OUP.
As the recipient of this year’s residency award, he will be based in Hawaii, at the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in Honolulu, for three months, from February to May next year.
Of Rotuman, Tongan and Palagi descent, he will use the award to complete a collection of poems exploring his Pasifika heritage. These will include poems inspired by the myths and legends of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa and will incorporate work about Mana Moana, the power of the ocean and ancient Pasifika connections.
He also hopes to research and begin "a prose memoir about my mother’s extended family, my cousins, scattered across the Pacific".
He grew up in Fiji and South Auckland and previously was a factory worker and city council gardener.
He is now a full-time editor, poet, art critic, reviewer and freelance journalist, whose reviews, articles, essays and short stories have appeared in many publications since the mid-1980s, including the Listener, Art New Zealand, Urbis, Metro and Landfall.
"My Pasifika heritage runs all through my writing from the beginning as part of my personal context and background and I have always drawn from this heritage and history," he said.
The role of this heritage had been "not necessarily" overt in his writing, but had been there as "part of a dialogue with ideas about cultural crossover".
