Uther writes: 'With every month that passes since handing in my thesis script - an event I cannot reflect on without the stinging sense memory of No Doz on my tongue and blisters on my fingers from fevered last minute rewrites - I appreciate my year at the IIML more. Which is not to say that it was not special at the time, only that it grows ever more so with time and distance. I didn't just learn structure. I didn't just learn not to start every other line with "Well…" I learnt how to be a writer, how to treat it as a job, as a serious (or not-so-serious) piece of working that needs to be done every single day. I learned not to apologise for my writing or with my writing. I learnt, most importantly, how to be with other writers. How to share. How to take feedback. How to know what a work wants to be rather than what I want it to be. It is not that my year at the IIML made me into a better writer, it made me into a writer fullstop. Rather than the guy covered in chip crumbs who liked the idea of being a writer that I was before. There is no word on any of my pages, no idea in my head and no moment I am alive that is not glowingly thankful for what 2012 at the IIML did to me.'

Bio: Uther Dean is a writer and theatre-maker. He completed a BA (Hons) in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington in 2010. Uther spent 2011 being co-editor (with Elle Hunt) of Salient, winning Best Publication at the Aotearoa Student Publication Awards. His writing has been published in Sport, the NZ Listener, The Wireless, Fishhead, The Pantograph Punch and The Lumière Reader.

In 2009, he co-founded My Accomplice, an award-winning, audience favourite theatre company with Hannah Banks and Paul Waggott, which he is currently creative co-director of. In the years since then they have produced more work than they can count; including A Play About Space, which saw Uther nominated for Best Newcomer Playwright at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards and won Best Theatre at the Dunedin Fringe in 2013, and Everything is Surrounded by Water, a monologue co-written and performed by Uther that won Best Solo at the New Zealand Fringe in 2014. They've also had a string of successes producing work as part of the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. They had the honour of opening the newly renovated BATS theatre at 1 Kent Tce with their STAB commission Watch, which Uther co-directed and wrote.

Uther wrote with Hannah Banks a sequence of 24 radio dramas with Radio New Zealand for the 2015 New Zealand Fringe (one for every day of the festival). He is the creator and 'show-runner' of the popular anthology audio-drama podcast The Witching Hours. His work has been performed across the country. He is currently writing a draft of a feature film for Gibson Group. He is also on the writing staff for Power Rangers.

Read more:

• My Accomplice
• The Witching Hours podcast