Literature Prize 2011

Comments by Sally Breen & Frank Moorhouse

First Prize ($10,000) ‘Tryst’ by Rachael S Morgan, Queensland
The winning story, Tryst, is a story in the realist tradition which begins as an excellent depiction of the familiar Queensland – or Australian – pool-side barbecue attended by two or more families and which gradually becomes more unruly. The story is told from the point of view of two children – a boy and a girl – who should be in bed but who are secretly watching the party and they hide under a bed in a room of the house as footsteps approach. The boy’s father and the girl’s mother enter the room, become amorous, and are listened to by the children and partly seen by them from under the bed. The story has great tension and is for the children an introduction to an adult world and to a sexual world into which they will shortly enter, like it or not.  An outstanding story which both judges felt stood out from the rest.

Second Prize ($5,000) ‘Forgetting’ by Maya Linden, Victoria
Forgetting begins with a simple premise – a young woman waits at home for her lover to arrive. He never does. This rejection triggers off a set of memories and nightmares rendered with exquisite sensorial detail by the author: women in Balochistan buried alive, the zip of a lover’s jeans cutting into a soft thigh, being stalked by muzzled tigers in the hallways of opulent hotel rooms – the pictures and sensations overlapping in a stream of fierce images as the character finds it more and more difficult to separate sex and violence, pleasure and pain, capture and seduction. Forgetting is a powerful and deeply moving portrayal of a world where women continue to be punished for strength of feeling from an author who refuses to pull her punches. 

Commended ($2,500) ‘How to make custard’ by Campbell Mattinson, Victoria
In How to Make Custard a man prepares a meal for the first meeting with his girlfriend’s parents. Her father’s alpha male reputation precedes him and the man is eager to match up to expectations. Things do not go to plan. A wryly humorous story about male competitiveness and disappointment How to Make Custard subtly reveals the building tension and hostility between the two men as they circle each other around the kitchen and the dining table like two boxers in the ring. This raw and barely capped masculinity is beautifully contrasted with delicate descriptions of food, evocative tastes and slow preparations and somewhere in this gap the author reveals to us just how far apart the two men are and the harsh reality of insurmountable difference. 

Commended ($2,500) ‘Into the Deep’ by Sarah Klenbort, New South Wales
Into the Deep is a highly engaging story about a young woman who is somewhat astray in the world who becomes involved with the free diving culture – free diving is competitive diving without oxygen tanks as deeply as one can into the sea in an attempt to retrieve a marker placed on the sea-bed  – described as the second most dangerous sport in the world . The young woman becomes rather obsessed by the woman who holds the female free-diving record – a woman she has never met – and is in turn attracted to a young woman who she mistakenly suspects is this champion. A passion develops between them through her mistake and her life takes another leap into a different deep.