1. Anthology of winners
2007 – 2010
Royal Society of New Zealand
MANHIRE PRIZE for
CREATIVE SCIENCE WRITING
2. The Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire
Prize for Creative Science Writing is an annual
creative science writing competition to encourage
science communication through the written word.
A different theme is chosen annually and writers
of all kinds are asked to submit a short story which
can be fiction or non-fiction.
The competition has been running since 2004
and the two winning pieces have been published
annually in the New Zealand Listener.
3. The Royal Society of New Zealand
Manhire Prize for
Creative Science Writing
Framework
Fiction winners
Non Fiction winners
4. Here is a story I once heard from a Dutch writer.
“One evening two frogs fell into a vat of milk.
One was a scientist. The other was a poet.
The scientist trod water for a while, then did a
rapid calculation involving the buoyancy of his
frog-body in milk. It was clear that he could not
last. He gave a sigh and sank to the bottom,
where he drowned.
The poet tried to remember what he knew about
milk. ‘Something about the milk of paradise,’ came
to mind. There was something, too, about the milk
of human kindness. Some lines for a new poem
of his own also occurred to him, though we will
not quote them here. And all the while he went
on treading water – or, more accurately, milk –
occasionally wondering how long he could last.
In the morning, the farmer’s wife came into the
dairy. There in the vat was a large block of butter
and … lying on top … a small, exhausted frog.”
Bill Manhire
