Anita Arlov
Writer
Anita writes flash fiction, short stories and poems, and occasionally runs workshops and judges short form fiction. Since 2012 she has managed and emceed a popular spoken-word event called Inside Out Open Mic For Writers. At this event, writers – poets, novelists, life-story writers, performance poets and more – can read their work to the audience (up to six minutes). The kaupapa is to welcome all writers – whether lifelong or just begun – equally, in a friendly and supportive setting. This event also features an excellent guest musician or small combo each time.
Inside out is held on the second Wednesday of each month at the Ockham Collective's space in The Nix building (6 Nixon St, Grey Lynn).
Anita was born in Christchurch. The child of WW2-displaced persons from Croatia who spoke several languages, Anita grew up enjoying the cadence and power of words. However, she began writing in mid-life, overnight, in direct response to the Canterbury earthquake in 2011.
For years she collated and distributed Anita’s Flier of Events, a free fortnightly email to 500 people listing arts events in the Auckland area. She worked with a small team to host Writers Lounge, a series of public conversations with leading writers, playwrights and journalists, in the Auckland Art Gallery.
Anita won the Divine Muses New Voices Poetry Competition. She convened a team that ran the NZ Poetry Conference & Festival 2017, a successful three-day celebration of all things poetry including vispo (visual poetry), spoken word and cine-poetics, with topical discussions, numerous workshops and readings from 95 of NZ’s leading writers.
In 2018 she won the NZ Flash Fiction Day Competition with 'He, She, It, They', which was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, and has gone on to win or be placed in several writing competitions here and overseas including the Sculpture in the Gardens writing competition. Her work is published widely including Best of Auckland 2020, Eight Poems 2020 ( Pear Tree Press), Flash Frontier: an Adventure in Short Fiction, Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Broadsheet, New Flash Fiction Review, takahē magazine, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction.
“I collect arresting facts, and like to approach something from a fresh angle. For example, imagining that inventor Daedalus did make the mainland seemed a story to rival the fable about his son who fell. How was his life thereafter? This triggered the flash Bird Man in Aotea Square. And reading Brigitte Bardot’s last public interview, after which she ditched films for a quiet life by the sea, triggered The Beauty Who Let Herself Go. I get a fix on a feeling, bite the blade between my teeth, dive in and commit to getting out alive.”
As a 2022 OC resident, Anita plans to continue hosting Inside Out, welcoming new writers to read their work along the way. She also plans to hold a flash-fiction writing workshop.
Anita is working on publishing a collection of poems and short fiction.