Ted Jenner is a poet, translator, and classical scholar who was born and bred in Dunedin. He has spent the last forty years living in Africa, Europe, and the northern parts of Aotearoa, publishing his work in a variety of literary journals. Writers in Residence is a compilation of most of Jenner's short fiction and prose poetry written in the last twenty years in New Zealand and Malawi. It has as its basic theme a search for meaning in a world which is resistant to such a search — the meaning lies in the exploration itself.

Texts that combine a detailed scrutiny of place, and the objects and 'spirit of place', that become rather an archaeological 'dig' in the unstated but present, presence of Herakleitos – where 'deep equals true'. – Michael Harlow