For Massey University’s literary Artist-in-Residence David Hill there is always a “sense of delighted disbelief” whenever he is nominated for an award, even though it has been a pleasing recurrence for the prolific author.

The Taranaki novelist, playwright, critic and journalist best known for his abundance of award-winning children’s and young fiction books has been shortlisted listed in three categories of this year’s New Zealand Children’s Book Awards.

His novel Enemy Camp, which describes the shooting of Japanese prisoners at the Featherston POW Camp in World War II, is a finalist in the Junior Fiction Award, and in the Children’s Choice Junior Fiction. His picture book on Sir Edmund Hillary, First to the Top, illustrated by Phoebe Morris, is short-listed for the Children’s Choice Non-Fiction Award.

Mr Hill’s novels for teenagers and children have been published in over a dozen countries. He is a past winner of the Esther Glen Medal and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. In 2010, he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa in the United States. In 2005 he was the 15th recipient of the Margaret Mahy Award.

Even with his legacy of awards, “having a bit of success makes you work better”, he says from his office in the recently refurbished and gracious Sir Geoffrey Peren Building on the Manawatū campus.

During his three-month residency, he has been working on his latest novel for teen readers. It follows five generations of one family and is roughly based in the area of Hawke’s Bay where his mother is from. The former school teacher likes to focus on historical topics in his children’s books these days, saying he has realised he can no longer write convincing contemporary fiction for young people. “I’m not a technophile and kids’ lives today are thoroughly imbued with technology.”

He’s also been reading and critiquing fiction by creative writing undergraduate students, and the results have impressed him. “They are finding their own voices, and the diversity of voices is fascinating.”

He’s found the University’s creative writing community “very energetic and very supportive too. I think its great to have a department in which so many of the teachers [lecturers] are also practising writers.”

Being able to spend three months “in the company of people where you don’t have to explain or justify what you are doing” is especially rewarding, says the author whose favourite writers are New Zealand’s Maurice Gee – “a brilliant storyteller and stylist” – and American novelist Cormac McCarthy, “who couldn’t be more different to me as a writer”.

As well as doing high school visits and raising awareness of Massey’s creative writing programme, he has been marvelling at the diversity of study programmes offered at Massey – from philosophy and Asian languages to vet science and engineering. He’s also been relishing the natural and architectural beauty of the campus and its distinctive character, captured in his observation that; “Massey is surely the only university in the Southern Hemisphere on whose map is a little square labelled ‘equine treadmill’.”

As the current Artist-in-Residence, he is living in a self-contained flat at the Square Edge Community Arts Centre on the Square until mid-July. Co-sponsored by Massey University and the Palmerston North City Council, the visiting artist programme is a unique opportunity to support community engagement between artists in creative writing, theatre and the media arts, which includes filmmaking.

Winners of the New Zealand Children’s Book Awards will be announced on August 8 at Circa Theatre in Wellington.