Claire Mabey Photo: Ebony Lamb Photography
- The capital city won't have a readers and writers festival this year.
- Wellington's writers residency at Randell Cottage, which has run for 23 years, is also urgently fundraising after not having its funding renewed.
- Creative New Zealand said they are doing their best to fund arts events around the country in the face of unprecedented funding demand.
Claire Mabey founded Verb over a decade ago to "make space for stories, books, writers and readers to come together" in Wellington.
This year, the organisation received only half of the funding they asked for to run events in the capital, so they have announced the Verb readers and writers festival will not go ahead.
Mabey said she doesn't blame funding organisation, Creative New Zealand.
"The ideal scenario is that Creative New Zealand receives more funding, which it badly needs and has needed for a long time, but until that happens, we have to get inventive," she said.
Describing herself as a natural optimist, Mabey said the pause will give Verb a chance to look at how to run the festival going forward.
"That' what we're looking at this year - alternative models, alternative methods of funding - I just think we have to reimagine how we do this."
Writer Dame Fiona Kidman said Verb has been a wonderful, lively writers festival, with a unique offering, different from other festivals around the country.
"It seems to part of the framework of what happens in Wellington city. I will certainly miss it," she said.
She wasn't surprised though that the festival is taking a pause, given its lack of funding.
"If their funding has been slashed by half it would be incredible hard to keep going," she said.
Dame Fiona is also a trustee of Randell Cottage.
The trust had for 23 years offered a writer's residency at the heritage cottage in inner-city Thorndon but she said Creative New Zealand had not funded them this year.
Dame Fiona said this seemed to be a particularly difficult time for arts funding.
"The Randell Cottage writers trust, which is also very much part of the Wellington writers' scene... we have suddenly been dumped," she said.
Central Wellington MP Tamatha Paul said the news wasn't good for anyone, especially for writers who miss out on opportunities to showcase their work.
"It's really disappointing to hear that some of our bastions of arts and culture haven't been given the funding they need to operate," she said.
Claire Murdoch from Creative New Zealand said the arts funding agency was experiencing unprecedented demand.
"Ever since Covid, we've seen significant increase in demand for all of our funding, and obviously the arts have been affected along with the rest of the country with rising costs," she said.
This has been in part because they stopped the deeply unpopular practice of capping the number of applications that could be made each funding round.
The cap meant Creative New Zealand was only ever able to receive the same number of applications (usually 250), so it was possible the true level of funding demand has only now become obvious to the organisation.
Like Verb, 70 percent of arts organisations funded by Creative New Zealand received less then they asked for.
Those arts organisations received on average 50 to 80 percent of what they said they needed.
Murdoch said Creative New Zealand values festivals, residencies, and writers.
"As New Zealand's art development agency, we want New Zealanders to have just great experiences, and for artists and art organisations to be successful," said Murdoch.
She said they try and strike a good balance between different art forms and regions across the country.
However, in the last Creative New Zealand arts organisations and groups funding round, only 11 of the 83 organisations funded were literary organisations, with almost two thirds receiving less than $50,000 in funding.
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