Sunday Star-Times announces Short Story Awards winners
The winning entry was intended as part of a novel and the author spent months trying to reduce it and reduce it, ‘killing myself over it’ before submitting it to the prestigious annual competition, he tells Kelly
As the popular literary advice goes, murdering your darlings is a difficult but necessary part of editing your work. For Robert Jenkins, who has taken out the top prize in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards, whittling down his winning story, The Skinny Man, to the competition cap of 3000 words was particularly brutal.
“I spent months trying to reduce it and reduce it, killing myself over it, to be honest,” Jenkins said on Friday, after learning he’d taken out the top prize.
“It was so hard to get it down. I wanted it to flow without losing itself.”
The result was not just a prizewinning entry (to the value of $8500) but effusive praise from literary judge, Harriet Allan, who described Jenkins’ story as “fresh, inventive, cinematic”.
London-born Jenkins, now living in Nelson, published his first novel in 2019.
The Fell was a coming-of-age drama about a boy trying to make sense of the world.
Jenkins is working on a second novel – he’s in the editing process, and that’s where The Skinny Man originated.
Also told through the voice of a child, it opens on children playing near a river and continues to read lyrically, almost foreboding.
“I took [the scene] out [of the novel] because it stood alone, and I thought it stood alone well. I started to think of it as a short story, as opposed to part of a bigger piece.”
He was “surprised” to get a call from Star-Times editor Tracy Watkins this week, informing him his entry had come out on top – out of more than 700 entries across all categories this year. “Always surprised,” Jenkins laughs.
Sponsored by Milford Foundation and Penguin Random House NZ, the awards this year attracted a bumper number of entries, with each judge remarking on the tough job ahead of them.
The winner of the emerging Māori writer category, chosen by judge Emma Wehipeihana, is Terri Te Tau (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne ki Wairarapa), for her story Hīkoi Whetū.
Te Tau is an artist and writer based in the Manawatū.
She's a member of the art collective Mataaho — Arts Foundation Laureates and winner of the 2021 Walters Art Prize. She has a PhD in creative arts and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation at Massey University.
Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including the recent anthology Past the Tower, Under the Tree: Twelve Stories of Learning in Community.
Wehipeihana said Te Tau’s story had a visually evocative opening line.
“The use of metaphor and descriptive language makes you feel as if this whānau/community drama is playing out in your own living room. I loved reading it, and look forward to reading more work by this writer.”
The winning of the emerging Pasifika writer category is Shelley Burne-Field, for her story, Nut-shots and a pig-on-a-spit. Judge Lana Lopesi said the entry “had me at the title...There’s a vividness to the writing, and a mastery of prose”.
Burne-Field (Sāmoa, Ngati Mutunga, Ngati Rārua, Pākehā) is Te Herenga Waka University’s International Institute of Modern Letters and Creative NZ’s emerging Māori writer in residence for 2024, where she will work on a novel.
A writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry, her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies, and is an alumna of the University of Auckland’s Master of Creative Writing programme.
Finally, former Ruawai College student Emma Philips is the winner of the secondary schools category, for her climate-themed short story Changing Landscapes.
“I took [the scene] out [of the novel] because it stood alone, and I thought it stood alone well. I started to think of it as a short story, as opposed to part of a bigger piece.”
Robert Jenkins
For the first time this category was themed, with sponsor Milford Foundation asking for stories that contained themes of climate change or the environment.
Judge Bernard Steeds said there had been many worthy entries but Changing Landscapes, told through a series of vignettes, “vividly evokes the threat posed by a changing climate... as the scenes change and the details accumulate”.
“I was left with a sense of inevitability and drama – of climate as a kind of god, acting with inexorable power on frail landscapes and human lives”.
Philips turned 18 the day before she learned she had won the competition.
She completed her final year of high school this year and next year is off to Auckland University to study physics.
Recently, she has also been commended and shortlisted in the 2023 Nation Flash Fiction Day Youth Competition, and placed second in the Aotearoa Yearbook Student Poetry Competition year 13 division.
“I’m always so impressed by the quality of our entries and this year in particular our secondary school entries were outstanding,” Star-Times editor Tracy Watkins said.
“This year’s theme produced an exciting depth of writing. We set young people the challenge of writing about one of the biggest issues of our time, and they responded with writing that showed the environment is at the forefront of their thinking, and imagination.”
The specialist category winners each take home a $1500 prize.
We’ll be publishing all of the winning short stories in the Sunday Star-Times over summer and on The Post’s website for subscribers.
The Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards are made possible due to the generous support of major sponsor the Milford Foundation along with publisher Penguin Random House.