Comments from judge Bernard Steed

There were many worthy entries, but in a competition there can only be one winner. For me, that story is Changing Landscapes.

In a series of brief vignettes, each inspired by a famous painting, this story vividly evokes the threat posed by a changing climate – Van Gogh’s The Starry Night becomes Auckland in a clattering thunderstorm; Constable’s The Hay Wain becomes a hay-baling scene on a sodden Northland dairy farm. Subsequent vignettes alternate between the city’s postflood clean-up and the drowning farm.

Each of these scenes is quiet and brief, just a few paragraphs of evocative description – the Nike shoes and driftwood washing up on the post-flood tide, the drowned cow with its limbs “positioned jankily alongside [its] bloating body”. Yet 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. If the language sometimes strains for effect, that also seems appropriate in a story about encroachment and broken boundaries.

The paintings – American and European masters, most depicting scenes in nature – jar against the recognisable New Zealand landscapes, but also seem to symbolise the colonial and capitalist tides that have imposed climate change on all of us. Changing Landscapes is at once original, evocative, risky, and very relatable – a portrait not of a terrifying climate future but of a poignant and increasingly desperate climate present.

The story asks us to confront, before it’s too late, the losses that are already occurring.

It’s a worthy winner.