Flora Feltham

Discipline:: Literature
Awards:: Springboard Award 2026
Highlight:: "This award is completely life changing, and I am so grateful to Te Tumu Toi, and all the donors, who make it possible. For me, this is the difference between not writing and writing: I am going to use the award to pay for otherwise unaffordable childcare for my one-year-old. I am also intending to work on a novel, which is a new mode for me. It’s so rare as an artist to be given such generous time and space to make work, even rarer to have a time of artistic growth supported by a mentor too."
Last Update:: 23/04/2026, 04:22 pm

Flora Feltham

Receiving the 2026 Springboard Award gifted by Joy Shivas – Mentored by 2011 Laureate Emily Perkins

Flora Feltham is a writer, weaver and archivist from Pōneke. Her 2024 essay collection Bad Archive was shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (General non-fiction), winner of The Spinoff's People's Choice Award for Best New Zealand non-fiction 2024, and selected as one of The Dominion Post's Best 35 Books of 2024. Her essays have also appeared in The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, New Zealand Geographic and The Spinoff. She lives with her husband and two daughters.

Panel Statement: “Flora’s Bad Archive was a dream debut, a book of essays at once personal, and eccentric, that let readers in on the behind-scenes working life of a young archivist who finds a dried flower pressed between the pages of a nineteenth century diary. Feltham is a deft writer with true range, able to ‘keep the scraps of the past from the bin of today.’ Feltham is an author to watch.”