‘If you’ve got a story, then tell it’
Virginia Fallon how winning the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards gave her so much more than prize money.
During the long days of Auckland’s lockdown Elsie Uini found she’d finally run out of excuses as to why she couldn’t start writing.
That’s what her mum told her anyway, and not only was she right, she was bearing news about a short story writing competition that she urged her daughter to enter.
‘‘You’ve got all the time in the world,’’ she said.
It was true, Uini wasn’t doing much else, so she did start writing, she did enter the competition, and then she won.
Taking out the Emerging Pasifika writer category in last year’s Sunday Star-Times short story competition was ‘‘a bit of fire under the bum’’, the Aucklander said on Thursday.
She’d always felt she had a story or 10 to tell but, like it does so often, life just kept getting in the way of creativity. ‘‘As well as that, I always thought, ‘there are so many stories out there, so why is mine something to read about?’’’
That story was called No Small Thing, told through the eyes of a young Samoan woman navigating two worlds, living