Tessa Piper – Winner
SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition winner, Tessa Piper. Source: Supplied
“This piece is like a punch to the face and guts with a stolen, diamond-studded glove. This story was a real outlier in terms of voice, pacing, perspective and artistic risk. Both judges felt so compelled upon first reading, that we came back to the piece multiple times. Each re-reading yielded some small new gem, whether they be lines such as, ‘I can turn windows into mirrors,’ or disconcerting images of staring at zigzag stitching on buttonholes of strange men. Some scenes gave us the heebie-jeebies, some scenes made our hearts beat faster, and some left us in shock and awe. This is a story full of urgent vitality, artistically rendered in a truly affecting way that is without artifice.” – Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas
Secret scribblers, take heart: those almost forgotten pages in your desk drawer could yield literary gold, if the genesis of this year’s winning entry to the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition is anything to go by.
Tessa Piper, 37, had a story that had dwelt in her mind for 20 years, but it wasn’t until she heard about the Emerging Writers’ Competition’s theme of “emergence” and had a conversation with someone about climbing out of windows, that she had an epiphany about how to write it – leading to publishing success and winning the $5000 literary prize. Not bad for her first time sending a story out into the world.
The award-winning story, , begins in a suburban house on an ordinary spring day, then shifts into a disturbing tale of drug abuse and child sexual assault. Piper captures both the raw ugliness and soaring beauty of the world, ultimately spinning a yarn of strength and hope despite the odds.
The Melbourne-based government employee who works in social policy said she didn’t think anyone besides herself and the judges would read the finished story – a conviction that turned out to be a gift. “It meant I could drown out the noise and my inner critic, and just get on with writing it,” she says.
She had previously only shared her writing with a select few friends and family, so was flabbergasted when she got the call to tell her she’d won. “I was genuinely shocked. I didn’t sleep for three nights afterwards,” she says. “It’s completely mind-blowing that anyone has read and connected to the story, let alone the two judges. It has been really affirming in a lot of ways.”
Writing the story was a personal healing process, but she also wanted to cast the net wider and pay homage to other women who’ve been brave enough to come forward with their stories – not just the “Me too” advocates of recent times, but also the generations who came before them.
A voracious reader from a young age (she used to record herself on an old tape player reading Paul Jennings books aloud), Piper has also kept a journal for most of her life, and it’s from those pages that she draws inspiration for her stories. “I’ve always kept and written down images and memories. I’ve got a treasure trove of material,” she says.
Piper is incredibly grateful to the judges and SBS for her win, and is now returning to her literary pursuits with renewed vigour. She’s been working on a few short stories and a couple of children’s books, and is considering dusting off other writing projects, too. Her ultimate goal in all these endeavours is to “keep putting words to things that have been left unspoken for various reasons. We’ll see what happens from there.”
If you need support, you can contact 1800 Respect on 1800 737 732 or visit , or contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit .
Monikka Eliah – Runner-Up
“It’s possibly one of the most universal of stories: that of a child lost in a market. Yet this astonishingly confident story reads as if we are hearing that tale for the first time. We are in the shoes of that child, and we experience the sanctuary she finds in family, and her overwhelming fear and terror when she believes that safety has gone. The theme of emergence is literal, and also attached to memory: those defining small moments from childhood that with hindsight we realise were not small at all – that they gave us a direction of how to be in the world. A terrific short story.” – Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas
Monikka Eliah admits she has a “crazy good” memory. It’s a handy skill for a writer. Getting lost and finding her way back at the shops is a childhood memory that inspired her prize-winning story, .
Eliah, 30, was born in Jordan. Her refugee family moved to and later fled Iraq for Sydney in 1998, joining Fairfield’s Assyrian community in Sydney’s west.
Getting lost happened a month after landing in Australia. “I couldn’t speak English, so I was absolutely terrified when it happened. This was a time when kids didn’t have cell phones and sometimes even adults didn’t have cell phones.”
Eliah recaptures her childlike wonder, panic and awe, re-creating a nostalgic world of budget Australian supermarket Franklins and local franchise Michel’s Patisserie, which she idealised as serving the fanciest cakes in the world.
The use of a cabbage, part of Assyrian cuisine, was a powerful metaphor. “Almost at the end of writing it, I thought, okay, at this point I know that the cabbage is just completely messed up, it’s lost all its beauty and it’s ruffled, obviously working that as a metaphor for how ruffled the aunty would be and how ruffled I was.”
As a kid she was always begging for an extension of the four-book library limit. “I always read, but I never thought that writing was ever going to be something accessible to me.” At university she submitted a story for a literary journal only after a friend did. “It got published in there and then it was just a gradual process of, oh, maybe this is something that could happen.”
Eliah said she was proud to use her work to represent the Assyrian experience.
“I think there is a rich oral storytelling tradition in Assyrian culture, because after being displaced it’s one of the ways that you hold on to culture and traditions… and this was a way for me to have a space and be able to say things about myself and about my community.”
Eliah says the win means so much to her in the often financially precarious and isolating life of a full-time freelance writer.
“As a writer it’s very unstable, and you’re always applying for things and you’re always very hopeful that something will come together. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. To get this phone call and to get this opportunity and to have this feeling and this positive reception to something that I’ve written, I think is quite exciting and quite incredible.
“I think the main takeaway from this is, just, ‘You’re doing good, kid. Maybe you can do this thing.’”
Gemma Tamock – Highly Commended
Highly commended, Gemma Tamock. Source: Supplied
“This story beguiled us. There’s a charming simplicity to the telling, as if the writer is sitting next to you in the corner of a dazzling party and spinning you a lovely yarn. Yet, re-reading it, one is aware of how deft the crafting of the tale has been and how expert the writer has been in her use of humour and reminiscence. There’s a sinewy strength to the writing that is crucial to its beauty and its refusal of sentimentality. It’s a lovely, moving and joyous piece of writing.” – Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas
When Gemma Tamock found out she was highly commended in the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, she started crying.
“I think I said something like, ‘Oh, finally!’”
Tamock had been diligently submitting to various competitions for years. Just before she entered, she had a “horrendously weird” rejection from a publishing company for her memoir. Tamock went to her writers’ group with an earlier version of her story. “I just burst into tears and said, ‘Actually, honestly, I don’t think I ever want to write again!’
“(But) I took their feedback on board and made this (entry). I followed their suggestions, and look what happened!”
Tamock, who trained as an opera singer, was hospitalised after the birth of her 4.5-year-old son. The event kickstarted her writing. She wrote 80 pages of her book on her first day in the acute mental health ward. “It helped me work out how to find a way through and get back to myself. I was kind of trying to write myself out of ‘insanity’.”
Her entry, , is her first-ever published piece of writing. It traces her meeting the love of her life through dance, and features magic-realist spiritual scenes. “I had been really shy about the whole goddess factor because I felt that it might mean that I was ‘insane’.”
Her husband, Joe, is the star of her story and her life. “He likes the way I tell the story about (meeting him). And he is amazing… I often get feedback from my writers’ group, ‘Oh, my gosh, your husband is amazing!’
“Because he is the person I expose the most in my writing, apart from myself, I wanted to be sure that he would be okay with it. I showed him the comments and he went away and read them and had a cry, and came back and read them back to me. It was new information – he was really proud.”
Alexander Burton – Highly Commended
Highly commended, Alexander Burton. Source: Supplied
“A whole life and a world are conveyed in this eloquent and quietly melancholic short story. Capturing the dislocation that is part of being wrenched from one’s background, family and class is not an easy thing to write about, for it is a complicated subject. Yet the economy in the telling and the generosity in the writing of this short story makes it succeed. The author takes the most prosaic of contemporary objects – the lanyard – and invests it with history and regret, aspiration and loss. We judges were deeply moved.” – Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas
When Alexander Burton got the news he’d been highly commended in the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, the 24-year-old Tasmanian PhD student was on a bus on his way home. “I probably scared the other people on the bus, just sitting there smiling to myself, looking a bit strange,” he laughs.
He says he still needs to process the comments of the judges, who said they were “deeply moved” by use of the lanyard to express the dislocation he felt moving up class levels as he lovingly reflects on his father’s work as a groundskeeper and his own life as an academic.
The youngest of five in a working-class family from Tasmania’s Huon Valley, it was a trip overseas that inspired Burton to enter his first-ever published piece.
“Writing that and connecting these two different worlds… (has) helped me to bridge that gap between my life at home with my family, where I came from, and this weird office environment I found myself in, with lots of very clever people from a very different background. It’s a big bridge for me, emotionally.”
As a kid, Burton was no good at bricklaying or carpentry, but helped his family by editing résumés for dyslexic relatives. Academia allowed him to focus on his passion for the climate crisis and social justice, but also limited his desire to explore emotion. “There is that sort of bias towards wanting to do things that are really tangible and that you can rely on… You live in a life where you can’t just plan your needs because you are the safety net for other people.”
Burton said he often suffered impostor syndrome and felt churlish in comparing his own life to others’. “You don’t see class when you’re surrounded by it, and I came off well from that. I grew up with a lot of people who were going through the foster system. People who never lived in a house that their family owned. Those were my friends growing up, and many of them are still my friends. (In contrast) we’ve got food on the table every day, we’ve got jobs, we have our own house. So you don’t say, ‘Oh, we’re struggling’, because you’re not, relatively.”
It’s this humility that characterises Burton, who says he wants to donate his prize money to charity. He dedicates his story to his nanna, Wilma Burton, the family matriarch who “loved us”.
Sidney Norris – Highly Commended
“This piece, about how a young man is affected by his mother’s illness, is written with a compelling voice – one that has wry humour and excellent narrative drive. We found this piece all the more affecting because of the writer’s candour and his ability to weave a metaphor about emergence (involving a cocoon, of all things!) that’s neither clichéd nor well-worn, but speaks about recurring dark episodes with hard-won self-awareness.” – Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas
Sidney Norris, 30, is a musician who also works in TV post-production. The Sydney-based creative has been writing short fiction and poetry and entering writing competitions for several years, but it was his first try at memoir that yielded success.
looks at his mother’s long-term struggle with psychosis, and the rippling effects of her condition. The story tells of a night when 10-year-old Sidney is dragged on a long walk to the police station at his mother’s behest, and other distressing episodes involving screaming in McDonald’s and the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his beloved Jack Russell pet, Teddy.
Writing is his way of making sense of his turbulent and bewildering childhood. “Understanding things is so important to me, because comprehension is the complete opposite of how confused and in the dark I felt for a lot of my life,” he says. “I was so fearful as a kid.”
He struggled with depression and was hospitalised when he was 17. “It’s been a really long mental health journey,” he says.
The “cicada” of the story’s title refers to his realisation that he needed to emerge from the hard shell of his own depressive thoughts. “If cicadas don’t get out of their shells quick enough, they can die,” he explains. “The thing I needed to escape from is me, or a version of me.”
Norris is “so grateful” that the judges saw something in his piece, leading to his first published story and literary accolade, and appreciates their comments about his candour. “Not everyone can arrive at a place where they can talk about mental health,” he says. “To me, it’s important to be detailed about it, because it helps to foster empathy. Mental illness is so often reduced to a shorthand diagnosis – ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ – that’s easy to dismiss. But they’re often such personal afflictions that are wholly unique to the individual. Empathy is born from just trying to understand.”
Norris’ wife, who sent him the link to enter the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, has been a champion of his writing and his path to recovery. “She’s been a real advocate for my mental health and finding the right avenues for healing,” he says.
His relationship with his mum is now “amicable” and she has recovered from her years of psychosis and paranoid delusions. “We share a powerful history with a lot of emotions,” he says. “I don’t want her to think that I’m holding onto resentment and anger, because I’m not. But it’s important to acknowledge what happened.”
Norris is about to release a solo album fusing instrumental music with spoken poetry. He intends to continue writing, and one day hopes to write a novel or a play.
If you need support, you can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or visit , or contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit .
Listen to the podcast
The winning competition entry that took 20 years to write
RELATED READING
Tessa Piper's winning entry was 20 years in the making
