Literary Dunedin going online

University of Otago English student Aliesha Pienaar is creating a digital database of Dunedin’s...
University of Otago English student Aliesha Pienaar is creating a digital database of Dunedin’s literary history. Photo: Gregor Richardson.

Dunedin's literary riches are being recorded in a digital database to help promote the city’s writing and writers to the world.

The collaborative project between the Dunedin Unesco City of Literature and University of Otago English student Aliesha Pienaar (21) will record information on writers from the city, as well as literature about locations in the city.

Mrs Pienaar said the database would serve many purposes.

"It can serve as the basis for research projects, lectures at university, lectures at school, an actual physical map where people can go walking around Dunedin.

"It is there as the material for people to use in a variety of ways."

So far she had gathered information, through interviews and archives, on the lives and works of authors including James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch, Janet Frame and Andrew Porteous.

Book settings and poem locations also counted as literary hot spots, and sites recorded so far included the Robbie Burns statue, 33 Jetty St and Warrington Beach.

Dunedin City of Literature director Nicky Page said the database could be used for an app.

"The information could feed into all sorts of planned initiatives.

"One is the possibility of a literary app allowing locals and tourists to identify significant literary places around the city and then burrow deeper, finding out where writers lived, where they met friends, where they wrote, and even showing where fictional characters lived and maybe died, and where fictional events took place."

Mrs Pienaar hoped the database would further open the Dunedin literary scene to the international literary community.

"I think people can be scared of the locations that authors in Dunedin use because they are unknown to them.

"So sometimes it just stays here [the writing].

"That’s why creative ways of promoting Dunedin literature are so important."

Next year Mrs Pienaar would complete an honours degree in English and the database would be passed on to a new intern.

"It is a very collaborative past, present, future thing that is happening, and probably won’t ever be finished because new writing is always being produced," Mrs Pienaar said.

margot.taylor@odt.co.nz

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