16.03.22
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is thrilled to announce the winners and highly commended entries for the 2022 Award Mentorship Program for Writers and Illustrators!
The Program has been made possible by the generous funding from the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. The Award offers twenty-one 20-hour mentorships with an experienced author, illustrator or publishing professional to help develop their manuscript or illustration project to a publishable standard. In addition, the winners each receive access to the Pathways to Publishing program, a free ticket to our popular Virtual Literary Speed Dating event and one-year’s free membership to the ASA. The four highly commended applicants receive a four hours of mentoring on the first ten pages of their manuscript or illustration project, as well as access to the Pathways to Publishing Program.
The ASA received a record-breaking 354 applications for the 2022 award; a 20% increase from last year. The winners were selected by a panel of assessors consisting of Sunil Badami, Brook Emery, Lee Kofman, Kate Ryan, Kristina Schulz, and Erica Wagner. The assessors remarked on the high quality of the applications and diversity of the applicants this year. The assessors have shared their comments below.
Children’s
Winners
Highly Commended: Charlotte Barkla
Young Adult
Winners
Highly Commended: Karen McKenzie
Highly Commended: Lea Zeestraten
Picture Book Illustration
Winner
Fiction
Winners
Highly Commended: Edwina Shaw
Narrative Non-Fiction
Winner
Winner
“I found the entries engaging and exciting – some full of heart and humour; some full of touching moments – and overall great reading. It was brilliant to see such a variety of themes and topics. I acknowledge the authors who told their own stories, or stories based on their families, as well as those who used their imagination to discover new lands, travel stormy seas or introduce the reader to fun and fantastic new worlds and characters. I loved reading about the different places, characters, adventures and plots outlined within the entries.
What stood out to me were the stories with heart – the ones that gripped me from the very first page. If I have any advice to offer, it’s to know the story you want to tell. Easier said than done sometimes! If you can pitch your story in a lift (advice from a former boss) and have your audience enthralled by the time the lift doors re-open, then you have the reader in the palm of your hand and they have connected with the story you have written.
The quality of entries was particularly high and congratulations to all who entered and those who were successful. It’s a brave choice to share your work and to press send on a submission. Well done for coming this far and best of luck for the next steps in your writing journey.”
- Kristina Schulz
“As a publisher and mentor, I am acutely aware that breakthroughs happen when writers and artists are given the right support at the right time. So I wish it were possible to award mentorships to all those who submitted work for this program. Finding your voice – working out what you want to say and how you want to say it – is a long process with many twists and turns and there is no quick fix to getting published. Butting up against the tastes of publishers, and the commercial realities of the industry can be a rude awakening but can also be galvanising as you seek to find the right form for your creative endeavours. So if you were unsuccessful this time, keep diligently working at your craft, read and read more to develop a critical understanding of the cultural landscape we all inhabit. Then serendipity and inspiration will light up your path.
For the winners, it was a delight to see your skills on show. The submissions that stood out exhibited a flair for language, intriguing story ideas and characters, and something of the ‘x’ factor – an original spark – respecting and connecting authentically to the emotional life and intelligence of young people."
- Erica Wagner
"Themes of loss and domestic violence were prevalent among this year’s submissions. Dystopia, especially environmental dystopia, was also a recurrent preoccupation of novelists. I was really impressed with how polished, how well crafted, most submitted works were, and how much thought went into fashioning intricate, sophisticated plots. So how do you decide on the winners then, when so much skill is on display?
The writer Kurt Vonnegut once offered the following advice to budding writers: ‘Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.’ I cannot agree more. Best stories have a sense of urgency about them. So when I read fiction, I always ask myself – do I get the feeling that the author really needed to write this story and therefore my reading experience feels urgent too? Of course, this isn’t the kind of question you can answer with any certainty, but I do know well that electric charge, that tension I sometimes feel that drives me to keep reading, when the writer’s urgency infuses the story’s voice and energises its narrative. And more often than not the high stakes are apparent from the beginning, the very first page – it is all in the voice, and the mood it creates, and in the pace of narrative.
As well as high stakes, the strongest entries had richly textured prose. Richly textured prose doesn’t exclusively belong to a particular writing style or genre (the winners were diverse in these respects). Rather, it is prose which isn’t just functional, isn’t just conveying the necessary information, but also prose where almost each sentence makes some interesting observation about the world and/or about the narrator. In other words, this year’s winners are attentive, thoughtful and idiosyncratic storytellers."
- Lee Kofman
“This year’s Cal/ASA mentorship award was characterised by a very broad range of entries, both in terms of setting, style, plot and voice, and with subjects varying from the apocalyptic, the historical right through to romantic comedy. In an odd prescience, there were several entries featuring the Soviet Union as both a setting and a thematic concern, which gave them a particular intensity considering recent events in Ukraine. It was refreshing to have several entries centralising elderly people, too often ignored as fictional subjects or relegated to minor roles, and endowing them with verve and agency. International settings, including South Korea, Italy and the Soviet Union, also featured, reflecting the fluid (pre-Covid at least) nature of the world today. It was good to see writing which explored the complexity of life in contemporary Australia, including the experiences of marginalised communities. Some entries used autographical events as the starting point for stories which were then transformed into hybrid forms, sometimes from surprising angles and being playful with form. As always, with any subject, a unique and compelling voice is the single, most effective way of bringing a story to life. Successful writers were those whose voices stood out as unique and immediately arresting. It would be valuable for future applicants to bear in mind the importance of a strong voice (over and above a complex setting or plot).”
- Kate Ryan
“Submissions were of a generally good standard, with many entrants displaying a commitment to their craft and work, including entry to competitions, winning prizes, and undertaking creative writing courses and mentorships.
There was a range of intriguing stories, structures and genres within the submitted entries, where the admittedly blurry lines between non-fiction and fiction were often crossed, but also confused, with a number of entries more fictional than non-fictional in parts. Many stories were deeply moving, sometimes hilarious, occasionally surprising and often inspiring. There was very little between many entries, even between those which were long listed and shortlisted, and it was very difficult to determine only one winner.
Having said that, many manuscripts were exceedingly long, and it’s recommended that for future submissions, entrants edit their work to a length of between 70,000 and 80,000 words to ensure maximum possibility of publication.
For those authors who are unsure of their voice or work, it is recommended that they enter their work to prizes or literary journals to gauge its publishability and success, and to build their publishing history. A shorter First Ten Pages mentorship may be more appropriate for them to determine if their work is viable or publishable, and it is recommended that work submitted has been revised beyond first, second or third draft. Enrolling in writing courses or joining writing groups to get immediate feedback will also help to improve and polish work.
Regardless, thank you for sharing your stories and work, and wishing you and your books all the very best success.”
- Sunil Badami
“There were only a small number of applications for the poetry mentorship this year. One application stood out for the depth of its engagement with poetry which was evident in the variety of forms employed, the sense of the line, the fluency of the rhythms, and an ability to develop its subject. Other applications were competent, sincere and enthusiastic but lacked that spark of originality, interest and urgency which would have made them stand out from other competent poets. Too often the poems failed to rise above the level of simple observation or stream of consciousness and were unmediated by the interesting or surprising turn of word and line which make poetry ‘poetry’.”
- Brook Emery
The 2022 Award Mentorship Program for Writers and Illustrators is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
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