Now in its third year, the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition is an initiative from designed to uncover bold new voices that reflect the diversity of contemporary Australia.
Aspiring writers are invited to share their memoir stories of up to 2000 words, for a chance to win prizes and have their work published in an anthology. This year’s theme was “emergence” and it invited a wide range of entries on everything from birth to overcoming illness and emerging from complex life circumstances.
“We are immensely proud of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, which helps bring great talent to the fore,” says Kathryn Fink, SBS Director of Television. “This initiative gives diverse and undiscovered writers an opportunity to tell powerful stories each year around a different key theme, and we’ve seen it go from strength to strength each year since the competition was launched in 2020.”
Winner Tessa Piper’s unsettling yet beautifully rendered tale of childhood trauma was two decades in the making. “I actually wrote the first draft 20 years ago,” she says.
Upon seeing an advertisement for the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, something “just clicked” and she wrote her entry, , in one sitting.
Tessa Piper, winner of the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition for her story, ‘The Usual’. Source: Supplied
Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas, both award-winning authors, describe her story as “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,” they note.
Pung says both judges felt so compelled upon first reading that they came back to the piece multiple times.
“Each re-reading yielded some small new gem, whether it 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.”
Piper, who was at the local swimming pool with her children when she received the news of her $5000 win, describes it as “mind-blowing”.
“Up until now, I hadn’t allowed myself to think of my writing as more than just files on my computer, something I did for fun and occasionally shared with family and friends,” she says. “But if I’m honest with myself, having people read and connect with my writing is a dream I’d never allowed myself to engage with properly until now.”
Assyrian-Australian writer Monikka Eliah took out the runner-up prize and was awarded $3000 for her piece, , which tells of a child lost in a supermarket and is described by the judges as “astonishingly confident”.
This year, the judges also chose three Highly Commended entries, with each winning a prize of $1000. They are by Gemma Tamock, by Alexander Burton and by Sidney Norris.
All the entries have been published on the .
Judges Pung and Tsiolkas congratulated all the winners and entrants on the quality of the work in this year’s competition.
Christos Tsiolkas and Alice Pung are the judges of the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition. Source: Getty Images; Courtney Brown
“It was an absolute delight to judge this competition with Christos. The quality of the shortlisted stories was outstanding. Each piece took us into a different world, peopled with characters and realities both familiar and foreign to us,” says Pung.
Tsiolkas was similarly impressed. “[Alice and I] were united in seeking that voice we have not heard before, or one that retells a familiar tale in a new way,” he says. “It has been a joy to be part of this process, and I want every single writer to know that we took their work seriously and were impressed and gladdened by the power and breadth of the stories we read.”
Thirty shortlisted entries from this year’s competition will be considered for inclusion in an official anthology of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, to be published by Hardie Grant in 2023.
This follows the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition anthology, Between Two Worlds, which was published in August 2022.
Listen to the winners speak about the process of writing their stories on the final SBS Voices podcast episode of , in the , , , , or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Meet the winners
Meet the winners of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition 2022
Listen to the podcast
The winning competition entry that took 20 years to write
