Ready, Set, Write! Sargeson Prize Opens For Entries

Entries for New Zealand’s richest short story competition on April 1, and with last year’s winner saying the experience “stitched an egg of possibility” into believing she might make it as a writer.

Leeanne O’Brien from Piha won $10,000 in the 2022 Open Division with her story ‘Crawl Space’.

“The Sargeson Prize has mana and, even now, after all the flurry and publicity has died down, that gift remains - to encourage me to keep going,” Leeanne says.

“There are only a handful of literary prizes like the Sargeson Prize available in New Zealand. If you don’t enter, you will never be in the running to be plucked from the basket, bewildered, astonished, and thrilled.”

Leeanne says the benefit of winning is not only the prize money but the recognition - something she hopes may open doors when trying to have work published.

The Sargeson Prize was established in 2019 by Waikato University Creative Writing senior lecturer and award-winning author Catherine Chidgey and has grown year on year - from 728 entries in 2019 to 1125 in 2022.

This year’s judge is Vincent O’Sullivan, an acclaimed poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and librettist.

He says there are no rules to a short story.

“All it has to do is convince completely in the limited space it has. The challenge is to make your people convincing as they move through time, so that at the end the reader thinks, ‘Yes, how complete that feels. It needs nothing more.’”

It's also, first and foremost, through the quality of the writing that a story lives, Vincent adds. Whatever else a story is about, it is always about the way it is written.

A goal of the Sargeson Prize is to celebrate and promote New Zealand short story writers - both new and established, says Catherine.

While not everyone can win, she loves reading the wide-ranging work from across Aotearoa and watching the entries pour in - especially on the last day.

“My favourite task of all is ringing the winners to deliver the good news.”

The Secondary Schools Division first prize has increased this year from $500 to $2,000, and the winner will also receive a one-week summer writing residency at the University, including accommodation and meals at one of the Halls of Residence, writing space in the School of Arts, and mentoring - a taste of the feedback the Creative Writing papers at Waikato offer new writers.

Winning stories will be published online on ReadingRoom.

“We need big, national short-story competitions of this nature to foster our writers in this exciting genre,” says Catherine. “I’m so proud the University - in addition to being a centre of excellence in the teaching of Creative Writing - makes it all possible.”

Entries for the Sargeson Prize open on April 1 and close on June 30.

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