Wellywood Woman

Jane Campion (photo Duncan Inns, courtesy Arts Foundation) It was a beautiful end to a beautiful week for New Zealand women writers. There’d been celebration all the way. One hundred and twenty-five years since Katherine Mansfield's birth (14 October). And on October 15 – in NZ or the UK – Ella Yelich-O'Connor (Lorde) and her co-writer Joel Little won New Zealand's most prestigious songwriting award, the APRA Silver Scroll , for Royals  – it was also Royals ' third week at no 1 on the US singles charts – writer/director Jane Campion was made an Arts Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation – at last a formal New Zealand acknowledgment of her brilliance – and Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker Prize for  The Luminaries . ‘What do you have in your water there?’ someone emailed me from overseas, and that reminded me of a passage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own– …it is time that the effect of discouragement on the mind of the artist should be measur...