We have great pleasure in announcing the names of the winning entries of the National and Hunter categories of the NWF/joanne burns Microlit Award.
The National winner is Sydney-based Waradjuri writer, BRENDA SAUNDERS for her piece called ‘Birding’. Here’s what Cassandra Atherton, the award judge said about it:
Brenda Saunders’ ‘Birding’ is a brilliantly surreal narrative about a bird watcher who has a scrub wren nesting inside her head. The bird subversively chirps and scratches all day, creating a kind of fractured tinnitus and a ceaseless, sleepless ache. The compressed microlit form creates clever reverberations of language which Saunders uses to mirror the bird ‘packed in’ the narrator’s head, sinisterly searching for a mate and sending her mad.
Brenda will receive a cash prize of $300.
The Hunter winner is JAN DEAN. Cassandra Atherton says Jan Dean’s ‘Fish Flops and Flaps’ wittily charts a family’s experience of being born with second toes longer than their first ones. This genetic inheritance creates a squeezed and cramped feeling in shoes, heightened by the Dean’s clever use of the microlit form. There are amusing scenes where, in crazy fish flops, the narrator’s long toes poke out from the open fish mouths, and relief when the narrator’s sister surprises her with a secret sound.
Jan will receive a cash prize of $300.
Spineless Wonders would like to thank co-sponsors of the joanne burns Microlit Award, the Newcastle Writers Festival. Check out the 2019 program released this morning.
Brenda and Jan's winning entries can be read, other finalists in the NWF/joanne burns Microlit Award as well as invited contributors in the anthology, Shuffle edited by Cassandra Atherton and available for sale, here or ask for it in your local bookstore.
Spineless Wonders would like to thank Deakin University for its support of the anthology, Shuffle.
