Award winning playwright Albert Belz is Waikato University’s writer in residence for 2010.

Currently based in Auckland, Belz has been writing full time for nearly a decade, mostly for the theatre but for film and television too.

He’s perhaps best known for his play Awhi Tapu which had a sell-out North Island tour and won a Human Rights Commission award for its “positive contribution towards harmonious race relations”.  In 2006 he won the Bruce Mason Award for outstanding emerging playwright and the following year, his play Yours Truly won best play at the Chapman Tripp theatre awards.

Other works include Te Maunga, Te Karakia, Guardians of Boy, and Whero’s New Net. His themes are many and varied covering reconciliation, love and loss, identity, Maori and Pakeha relations, and critics have regularly described his work as challenging. He says he’ll tackle almost any subject if he has an idea he thinks will work – anything except romantic comedy.

This is Belz’s second residency.  While working on a piece about New Zealanders in the First World War, he spent four months in Le Quesnoy, France – the town New Zealand soldiers liberated a week before the end of the war ended.

“And now it’s great to have the Waikato residency. First, because I have two daughters living in Hamilton, so it’ll be great being closer to them, but also having a regular income for a year means I can focus solely on writing, not making money.  I already have an idea for a play – to do with the Old Testament – tentatively titled Lightbearer, only I’m not saying anymore than that at the moment.”

He will also be completing two other works, a children's play about the Kaimanawa horses, commissioned by Capital E theatre in Wellington and another commissioned by Smackbang Theatre in Auckland, titled Raising the Titanics and set during the golden age of Maori showbands and due to open in Auckland in June.

Belz, who was born in Whakatane, is Ngati Porou, Ngapuhi and Ngati Pokai; his surname is Polish going way back on father’s side of the family.

Albert Belz will move to Hamilton in the new year.