National Writing Competitions - Results

2024

Short Story Fiction - judged by Margaret Wick, sponsored by Susan Walsh

Winner - Helen Lyne ♦ Unlocking Doors

Highly commended - Bronwyn Rodden ♦ Scone making

Commended - Coby Sullivan ♦ Fractured

Judge's Report – Margaret Wick

The authors of the 39 entries submitted in this Competition gave me the opportunity to visit beaches, nursing homes, hospitals, family kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, galleries, gardens and war zones.

I have been able to observe the complexity of relationships between husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, siblings, neighbours and work colleagues.

Recurring themes of rivalries and revenge, jealousy and resentment and domestic violence were common. Similarly were the refrains of the desire for love and acceptance, the power of kindness and forgiveness, the futility of war and its ongoing devastation. Without exception, all were explored with sensitivity and purpose.

I have cried, smiled and held my breath as I related to the circumstances portrayed, some of them close to home. The diversity of themes, like the emotions evoked, was impressive.

In reading and evaluating these entries two issues were paramount: what defines a short story, and what distinguishes a good one. We are all too familiar with the popular story format that is a short tale in a big space. I would define a successful short story as a big narrative in a short space, and therein lies the challenge for the writer: to create and present that delicate balance of theme, plot and character into an integrated, harmonious whole in a limited frame work. The successful result is a complete story, a stand alone unit.

Good short stories, like long ones, share similar criteria. For example:

They are able to attract and sustain the reader’s interest invariably by a well-crafted beginning and ending.
They have no need of 'filler', those unnecessary words and slabs of information that add no value to a story.
They demonstrate the efficiency of well-chosen vocabulary and metaphors, ensuring the flow of writing is succinct and on theme. There is no place for contrived divergence in the writing style.
They have been thoroughly edited for errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation.

All of the entries were enjoyable reading.

The better ones were those able to add extra dimensions to the writing by incorporating additional layers of development and interest to the initial theme with ease. This seamless integration of depth further secures the reader’s interest.

Shortlisting of possible winners was difficult, choosing the final three even more so. The best stories were those able to keep the reader as the primary focus by creating and maintaining engagement to the end, and the winning entries did this with flair and consistency.

All entrants deserve congratulations for selecting a genre that tests the capacity to distill a big story in a small space - a brave challenge and no mean feat. It is clear that the future of the Short Story is in safe hands, and The Society is to be commended for making a special category for this writing style.

Short Story Non-Fiction - judged by Teresa Petersen, sponsored by Shirley Randell AO

Winner - Melissa Bruce ♦ Blue-Ribbon Country

Highly commended - Cindy Broadbent ♦ In Australia I will…

Commended - Anne Smith ♦ Kintsugi Personified

Judge's Report – Teresa Petersen

WINNERS

BLUE RIBBON COUNTRY: This story well and truly captures what appears to be a typical lovely sunny day in Sydney. Action is set in one of the affluent beach suburbs and culminates in a suicide. The portrayal of everyday events is so well done, the scenes and smells so evocative that I felt part of it to the extent that it continued to linger in my consciousness.

IN AUSTRALIA I WILL: The story captures the Australia of the 1970s and the Australian way of life. The heat, poverty, boarding houses, distances travelled to get to work indeed anywhere, cultural differences between NSW and London, the hardship, homesickness weather differences and the gradual acceptance and success achieved through hard work and perseverance.

KINTSUGI PERSONIFIED: The writer uses glass as a metaphor to articulate the fragility of one’s very being and essence which is shattered like glass when after almost an entire lifetime it is discovered one is adopted. It is well written and the Japanese art of Kintsugi is expertly applied to highlight the gradual restructuring of the broken person to wholeness.

SHORTLISTED

A LETTER FROM THE COLONY: The tone and use of semi-educated language captures quite adroitly the late Victorian period. The entire narrative is epistolary. It commemorates Eliza O’Brien who comes to Australia aged 18 months with her family to escape the great Irish famine and ends up incarcerated in the Newcastle Industrial School.

LOOKING FOR GLADYS MARKS: The story deals with the subject of depression and how a letter from the politician Billy Huges to Gladys Marks provides the catharsis for the persona to find relief and a new life.

AND ONE STAYED HOME: A short well-written story that captures female self-sacrifice and suffering that was the accepted norm in past years. It expertly critiques this norm and connects the subject matter to the modern day through the writing of a school essay on Gender Equity: Womens Place in Australia.

Poetry - judged by Rosemary Huisman

Winner - Heather Cameron ♦ The Lie

Highly commended - Elanna Herbert ♦ Granite Falls

Commended - Joanne Ruppin ♦ Slaying by the Rules

Judge's Report – Rosemary Huisman

Thank you to the Society of Women Writers NSW for giving me the honour of judging the Poetry Awards in your 2024 National Writing Competition.

There were 63 entries, a testament to the continued interest in writing poetry. It should encourage all of us to keep reading poetry and, where we can, to support its publication.

First, a few remarks on my thinking as judge ...

Like much contemporary poetry, most of the poems were written in free verse. This choice implies no formal rhyme scheme or syllabic metre, but the poet's ear needs still to be alert to the rhythms of spoken English. Effectively, the free verse spoken poem flows, without unmotivated bumps, sometimes repeating patterns of stress. And individual features of sound, like alliteration and assonance, are not used merely for decoration but in order to foreground the significance, the meaningfulness, of the words so linked to the development of the poem. Thus, the shortlisted poem Drakensberg (Vanessa Proctor) moves poetically from individual loss to general human mortality.

While the spoken poem is now more free, the seen poem – how the poem looks on the page – usually remains more conventional. Most of the poems were conventionally displayed in lines of irregular length, usually left justified but sometimes centred and most displayed stanzas, that is a grouping of lines separated by a line-feed. However, given the resources of modern technology, the poet now more easily can play with different layouts, such as right justification in the prose poem or the use of interior line spaces instead of punctuation. The shortlisted poem In another time, witch (Anne Carson) made effective use of the latter.

As you would expect, the subject matter of the poems varied considerably. The poet's sense of the world and the language used in it encourages the search for a harmony of language and subject-matter - perhaps more everyday language to make a quotidian point or more elaborate imagery to develop a more complex experience. In an imaginative response to these demands, the shortlisted poem Bedazzled (Anne Benjamin) is written in five parts, with different uses of language and poetic structure.

Overall, in judging, I look for the cohesion of a poem, that is, how all choices of language - the use of sound, layout, word choice, grammatical structure - cohere, hang together to accumulate significantly for the experience of a reader.

So now the awards:

Commended: Slaying by the Rules, by Joanne Ruppin

As the title foretells, this poem accumulates language to represent two verbal realities for the one external reality. The external reality is that of war; the language of slaying asks questions about the suffering of children; the language of rules speaks the adult terms of treaties and legal justification. In the wording of line and stanza, this juxtaposition builds a strong emotional argument.

Highly Commended: Granite Falls, by Elanna Herbert

This is a most accomplished poem, a hymn, if you will, to the power of nature; the human poet is present only as 'me', not 'I', acted upon by the strength of the natural environment. The interplay of grammar and layout is impressive: the sequential grammatical sentences flow over and through the solid regularity of the five line stanzas. This interplay lends itself to symbolic interpretation by the individual reader - which I leave to you!

Winner: The lie, by Heather Cameron

This is a deceptively simple poem of human experience, with gendered perspectives on a not unusual situation. In part one, in four-line stanzas, the boy, pressured by schoolmates, lies about a girl. Appropriately, the figurative language of everyday clichés describes his success: He was the man at the head of the pack. / She was the stepping stone to fame. In part two, in two-line stanzas, with a school counsellor the girl finds the solace of different language: not her shame but his betrayal. In the last lines of part 1 and part 2, for both characters the word choice succinctly offers more psychological insight. Away from his mates, the boy wondered if it had been worth the sacrifice. And the girl can now return to her idealised memory of haloes of white around them as they kissed and later, she had pondered love and magical things / Like happy ever afters and dreams come true. Another lie, that of romantic fantasy?

2023

Short Story Fiction - judged by Carmel Bendon

Winner - Julietta Cerin ♦ Exposure

Highly commended - Kelly Boxwell ♦ The Boy

Commended - Maya Linden ♦ The Lide of Water

Judge's Report – Carmel Bendon

The short story is a very particular genre that requires much of the writer and the reader. It has the usual fiction elements of character, setting and plot, but all are in the service of a single point of conflict. It has an economy of words and ideas that are like clear brushstrokes of definition encompassing the essentials of the form while at the same time leaving space for readers to colour in other possibilities.

All the entries were extremely well-written, and most demonstrated a solid grasp of these essentials of the short story form. Such proficiency made the judging all the more difficult. The stories’ subjects stretched from childhood experiences to old age and dementia, friendships, lost loves, domestic violence, male pregnancy, outback misadventure, post-apocalyptic worlds, backyard abortion, bank jobs, death and more. The best stories exhibited daring and innovation in theme or subject or perspective and, in doing so, swept me along with them to a new idea, a different view, a surprise, a heightened emotion, laughter, or an unexpected twist. The shortlisted stories did all this and more, in exceptional writing style.

Exposure is a subtly drawn story of one white woman’s experience in Australia’s centre. It is, indeed, an exposition of the wide gap between white and indigenous culture and life experience in the very heart of Australia’s land and its people. It exposes a disconnection so vast that words fail in the 'immutable pitiless light' of the reality of the situation.

From the Mouths of Babes is, in its form, an interweaving of brief factual statements about the expected development of babies’ acquisition of language and a mother’s understandable concern about her baby’s slowness in this regard but, in its deepest themes, the story shocks with an insight into the grim reality of war.

Outside the Dome is an evocative futuristic imagining of life after an environmental calamity and a child’s hopes for the renewal of the natural world. The bittersweet conclusion is, simultaneously, heartbreaking and hopeful.

The Boy is a gritty story that addresses our middle-class complacency about the extreme harshness of the lives of young boys (and girls) in our society and the transgressions and tragedies that ensue, challenging readers to confront realities that we refuse to see.

Told from two points of view – that of two lovers – and full of exquisitely sensual descriptions, The Life of Water is a love story that compels readers to consider the limits of love, and the point at which love’s cost becomes too much.

Surprising and explicit, Wardrobe of Secrets is a sensually detailed story in which an old woman strives to ‘remember’ herself and the wild girl she once was by recalling and reliving an erotic, tempestuous and violent love affair.

Thank you to all the entrants for allowing me to read and enjoy your excellent works.

Short Story Non-fiction - judged by Jenny Strachan

Winner - Maya Linden ♦ Dust Figures

Highly commended - Jane McGown ♦ My Little Corner of the World

Commended - Louise Martin Chew ♦ Silence

Judge's Report – Jenny Strachan

'Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance…Among all these unexpressed experiences are those that are hidden and which have given our life its shape, its colour and its melody.' Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon.

There were twenty-five entries in the Non-Fiction genre with the majority in the sub-genre of memoir.

Thank you for trusting me with the very personal and deeply felt parts of your life in the memoirs. These memoir themes included being adopted, copying with a partner’s dementia, obsessive love, drug addiction, being raped, fighting an eating disorder, and living with a brain injury. These stories were very cathartic and as one writer expressed it, '… it’s only while writing this story that the nightmare finally makes sense'.

Other memoirs explored the universal themes of grief, loss, survival, overseas postings, migrant experiences, vagaries of memory, and tracing one’s family.

The essays ranged across historical periods, genealogy, provenance, poets, and The Voice to Parliament.

My key criteria in judging the Non-Fiction Prize were - the story had to be well written with clear prose, a clear voice and an imaginative use of language and imagery, and it needed to remain a pleasure to return to and then start reading all over again.

The successful stories stayed with me and moved me in a way that offered insight into an aspect of life and a connection to a topic of importance that resonated, well after finishing the piece.

The six stories shortlisted are a mixture of memoir and essay.

The winning entry, Dust Figures, explores the overwhelming power of obsessive love and how destructive it can be in our lives. The beauty of this piece is in the poetic writing Later that day, the sharp scent of crushed gold leaf and wet paint; the winter sea grey and opaque, a stained mirror in which I did not recognise my face. The strength is in the raw emotion and honesty expressing the drive of self-destruction balanced out against the writer’s rational self as she cites words of philosophy and feminist theory. This is not a story of empowerment and recovery…not every woman’s truth has to be a positive feminist narrative.

The Highly Commended, My Little Corner of the World, is a lyrical, gentle exploration of a daughter’s love of her mother as she travels through Italy, with the feeling of her mother accompanying her on the trip. The writer transports us through her rich and vibrant Italian migrant experience in Australia as she weaves in and out of Italian cities trying to reconcile the real experience with the imagined.

The Commended, Silence, is an essay on trauma and its place in the lives of our family and how it affects several generations. The title, Silence, is very poignant as it identifies the impact of trauma on nature, animals, humans and collectively race. '…trauma extends outside historical (multigenerational) trauma and systemic discrimination (such as racism) to note intergenerational and collective trauma…impacting smaller groups like families.'

This theme of family trauma was further explored in two of the shortlisted entries: The Soul of Kathleen Josephine Kelly and Twilight Bay, both grappling with the vagaries of memory and the impact of trauma on our lives.

The other short listed entry, Bayanhot Blues, set on the edge of the Gobi Desert, recounts the cross-cultural misunderstandings of an Australian AusAID project co-ordinator and her Chinese counter parts. The writer describes a myriad of cultural experiences with wit and frankness that make for a fascinating story.

It was a great pleasure sharing your memories, passions and interests and these experiences will stay with me for a very long time to come.

Poetry - judged by Judith Beveridge

2022

Short Story Fiction - judged by Jenny Strachan

Winner - Alexandra Dunn ♦ Violet

Highly commended - Paulette Gittins ♦ Forget it Jake

Commended - Julie Howard ♦ Recipes for Sisters and Wives

Judge's Report – Jenny Strachan

I congratulate you all on your Fiction writing because we know that stories are fragile things that can disappear or live on, to sometimes outlast the countries where they were created.

This year’s Fiction entries spanned 2,500 years ranging from Pericles Athens in 5th Century B.C.E. through years of wars and up to the 2022 Covid pandemic.

My key criteria in judging the Fiction Prize were: the story has to stay with me and move me in a way that it offers both insight into an aspect of life and a connection to a character whose fate I care about, well after the story has finished.

The story has to be well written with clear prose, a clear voice for the narrator or protagonist and an imaginative use of imagery. It needs to remain a pleasure to read and re-read, so that I look forward to starting it all over again.

The six shortlisted were all pieces with strong themes and characterisation with a well structured ending, offering the possibility of redemption.

The winning entry, Violet was an outstanding piece and when I first read it, I had to take a break from reading anything else that day. When I came back to it, it moved me even more because of the contrast between the powerful, poetic imagery of the prose juxtaposed against the violent setting, housing a “monster” of domestic violence.

I live within our house as a ghost. Bind my suffering and broken skin, shove all emotions into a little box and survive today … Evidence of past tenants, bleeds across mould stained walls. Motifs scrawled by hand, decorations of time wasted, drug induced stupor, and abject loneliness.

We witness the strength of the young teenage girl, Violet, who finally dials “000”, only to be dismissed by a Police Officer who suggests she is to blame for inciting violence in her father. This powerful story closes on a moment of hope, when Violet realises she has taken the first, vital step to free herself of this abusive relationship. It reminded me of the themes of this year’s Miles Franklin Award, Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light and how our system fails our children.

The Highly Commended, Forget it, Jake, deals with the universal theme of travelling in order to forget the reality we live in daily. The narrator-traveller is always once removed from the experience, glimpsing life from a bus or train window journeying nowhere in particular on package deals. But when a meaningful event does happen she is impotent, unable to act to save a life. This resonates through the story as we discover she was unable to act to save her brother from a devastating fall through the roof of her family garage and she travels relentlessly to escape the memory.

The Commended, Recipes for Sisters and Wives, is a highly original piece written in the form of recipes for daily life outlining ingredients for survival with some “bake times” of many years. The recipes start with the new baby coming home and then progress through the isolation of post partem, loneliness within an abusive marriage and then trying to care for her children. It reminds us that everyday women wake to prepare the meals of the day using the ingredients they have, whatever bits and pieces to make a meal in the hope that it will turn out well. They know they don’t have everything they want nor need, but make do just to help their family survive another day.

The three other short-listed stories continue with the theme of violence, trauma and living as an outsider.

Two of the shortlisted focus on the trauma of children in Europe during the Second World War. They are narrated focusing on a protagonist whose childhood anguish has affected their current relationship.

Looking for Peace is narrated by a granddaughter of a holocaust victim who is reliving the terror from her nursing home bed, in the hope that death will release her from the horrors of concentration camp memories.

The Past is a Dangerous Friend is narrated by the wife of a man whose past is destroying their marriage. As a boy he was terrorised by the life lived in a Russian internment camp. This prolonged suffering has nurtured in him a blood lust for the sport of killing game.

Ignorant Armies deals with a protagonist who is the “outsider” who doesn’t fit in with the petty criminal activity of his fellow workers. He is trapped by his mortgage in a job he detests where he has to compromise his ethical standards.

The other themes explored in the remaining twenty one entries are: intergenerational stories about the strong bonds between grandparents and grandchildren; boundaries – neighbours, relationships, generations; living as an outsider and displacement; living with dementia; exploits in crime; and changing identities.

A story is a dialogue between a writer and a reader, so thank you all for the conversations.

Short Story Non-fiction - judged by Paula McLean

Winner - Carmel Bendon ♦ Birds of a Feather

Highly commended - Judy Rowley ♦ The Only Way

Commended - Gwen Wilson ♦ Loving in the Shadow of Tito

Judge's Report – Paula McLean

The submissions for this year’s non-fiction entries include the subgenres of nature writing, travel writing, personal essay, and memoir. I read of ghosts and fairies, a former prisoner, birds and dogs and stinging bee therapy, mothers and matriarchs, survivors and families separated by great distances. The settings for the entries spanned the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Australia, Ireland and England, Chennai and sailboats in the Mediterranean Sea.

I couldn’t help but notice in many of the submissions a need to revisit former travels, not surprising given our stay-at-home Covid lives. But what characterised most of the essays was a great desire to express something the writer felt deeply about. I brought to the reading my own experiences and took away with me the often deeply affecting experiences of others. It was the three winning essays, however, that resonated most strongly, drawing me back again and again to look for more. I considered the craft of the writing itself, how the writer incorporated literary techniques such as metaphor, juxtaposition and imagery to enrich their writing, and if the writer avoided common pitfalls such as sentimentality and nostalgia, or awkward transitions of thought. Ultimately the three winning essays I chose demonstrated deep reflection and insight into the topics the writers chose to write about. It was a privilege to read and consider each of the entries for this year’s non-fiction prize.

Poetry - judged by Eileen Chong

2021

Fiction

Winner: Cindy Broadbent The Artist
Highly commended: Mo Duggan What Remains
Commended: Chloe Hillary Gilbert and Esme

Non-Fiction

Winner: Kathy Sharpe The Real Social Pioneers
Highly commended: Melissa Bruce The Posh Bitch from The Big Smoke
Commended: Cate Whittaker The Forgotten First-Wave Feminist

Poetry

Winner: Natalie Cooke Object Permanence
Highly commended: Julie Thorndyke Doing Their Sums
Commended: Samantha Johnson New Water

2019

Fiction

Winner: Kathy Prokhovnik A Day at the Beach
Highly commended: Jean Flynn Forty
Commended: Anna Bay The Tamarillo Tree

Non-Fiction

Winner: Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan Frothing
Highly commended: Susan Steggall Re-Carving an Identity
Commended: Carmel Bendon The Gift of a Book

Poetry

Winner: Joanne Ruppin Night Reunion
Highly commended: Anne Carson What if the lake …
Commended: Margaret Ruckert Unconformity

2017

Non-Fiction Essays and Articles

First prize: Anni Webster An Appetite for Awe
Second prize: Robyn Elliott Pilbara Boots
Third prize: Megan Wallens WB Yeats and Yours Truly
Highly commended: Carol Middleton You Are All Dreamers
Highly commended: Judith O'Connor Slippery Side of the Street
Highly commended: Joanne Ruppin Please Don't Tell

Short Story

First prize: Fran Collings Paper Nautilus
Second prize: Paulette Gittins Traumeri
Third prize: Polly Jude Rewind

Poetry

Equal first prize: Helen Thurloe Persistence in Three Languages
Equal First prize: Joanne Ruppin Stille Nacht and Silent Night
Highly commended: Susan Fealy The Night Before the Truck
Highly commended: Shane McCauley Thomas Merton

2015 - Theme: Be Inspired by Giving Women a Voice

Non-Fiction Essays and Articles

First prize: Pippa Kay Breathtaking
Second prize: Carol Middleton Dreaming of Freedom
Third prize: Pauline Harvey The Doctor's Wife
Highly commended: Chystal Abidin When you travel alone through foreign cities as a young woman
Commended: Nicola West The Fight

Short Story

First prize: Michelle Reidy This Is How A Voice Sounds
Second prize: Lynne Cook No Words For It
Third prize: Erica Woolgar Waiting For Mare
Highly commended: Judith O"Connor Run Rabbit Run
Commended: Bridget Mckern Lady-In-Waiting

Poetry

First prize: Cynthia Rowe Union Rep Ruby
Second prize: Carolyn Alfonzetti Canary Song
Third prize: Moira Kirkwood Flowering
Highly commended: Gail Hennessy Finding The Words
Commended: Colleen Keating In Search of Hildegard of Bingen

2013

Short Story

First prize: Sarah Endacott Shock-Shit
Second prize: Julie Chevalier An Honour that I"d thought not of
Third prize: Claire Aman Wrangler
Commended:
Julie Kearney Killing Him Softly
Suzanne Gaskell Beautiful Boys
Julie Chevalier Little Fires

Poetry

First prize: Susan Fealy The Hope Stone
Second prize: Dr Frances Olive At the Temple
Third prize: Marilyn Peck From My Bed on Dry Winter Mornings
Commended:
Gillian Hunt Heartland
Moira Kirkwood Moto (artist to Genius)
Ali Jane Smith Sestina After a Marriage
Lesley Walter In Memoriam (of Vera Newsom)
Winifred Weir Summer Is and Has Been

2012

Short Story

First prize: Susan McCreery Beyond Walls
Second prize: Meg Wallens Caretaker Li and My Sanity Patch
Third prize: Heather Bird Marked

Poetry

First prize: Winifred Weir We have one another now and again
Second prize: Lesley Walter At the Crossing
Third prize: Dr Penelope S Cottier A Brief History of Fun

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