Books That Made Us: Youth Fiction Prize
Voiceworks are excited to announce the Books That Made Us Youth Fiction Prize in collaboration with the ABC and The Wheeler Centre!
Students in Years 10–11 are invited to submit a short piece of fiction (up to 300 words) on the theme of Landscape.
Australian fiction captures our everyday lives and dreams. It holds up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad.
In response to the anticipated new ABC series, Books That Made Us, ABC Education has teamed up with ABC Radio National's Big Weekend of Books, The Wheeler Centre and Voiceworks to nurture the talent of young writers with a national competition.
You can reflect on people, power and place in any landscape, whether it's environmental, political, emotional or imaginative.
The last 18 months have changed the way you look at the world—not in some pretentious political way (although obviously that too), but in a literal sense—what you notice, where your eyes rest. Everything feels more significant, or at least more intentional—the illegible tag on the wall of the milkbar, the cracks in the concrete, the cricket bat left in the still-dewy grass.
You attend a career fair via Zoom (or some other group video call software that wasn’t named in such an easily verb-able way) and are randomly placed in smaller group calls with adults whose careers vaguely align with your favourite subjects, or the subjects you are taking because your teachers have advised you it will maximise your ATAR. A man—older than you, but younger than your parents—describes how his job has changed over the past year. ‘It’s actually been great! My job was reporting state parliament, which no one really cared about before. But now everybody’s watching the pressers and knows half the ministers. It makes the job so exciting!’
Your biology teacher distributes links to pre-recorded guided meditations to listen to the night before exams. ‘Don’t stay up late studying, sleep is more important to your knowledge retention than last-minute study’. You breathe in and out when the voice tells you to, trying to keep track of the rhythm of your thoughts, paying attention to where they rest. The recording ends, and you blink yourself back into reality. You pick up your diary and write. Key dates:
Entries will be accepted via Express Media's Submittable page, where you will also find our handy dandy Presubmission Checklist!
Full terms and conditions can be found here.
