Otago University Press announce the results of Landfall Essay Competition 2012.

Congratulations to the winner and runners-up!

Winner: Elizabeth Smither (right)

Runners-up: Majella Cullinane and Jane Williamson

DAVID EGGLETON, JUDGE - The Landfall Essay Competition 2012

Reading the entries, I became by turns an armchair traveller, a priest in a confessional, a student in a lecture room, a confidant in a tête-à-tête over the teacups, the recipient of proselytising tracts. All had something to offer, experiences to impart.

One essayist wrote in praise of old-fashioned letter-writing, another about visiting Antarctica. In the grand tradition of this competition, it was a commentary on our culture: a poem-laced account of struggling with the consequences of mental illness; an insider’s eye-view of recent protests at National Party gatherings in Auckland; the history of the extinct huia bird; an author’s discovery of the story of Te Whiti o Rongomai by way of an art exhibition about Parihaka; recollections of growing up in West Auckland; notes on daily life in present-day Grey Lynn; a story about sibling rivalry more like fiction than factual essay; a saga about fear of intimacy.

Two runners-up: journeying between specific places in Ireland, Italy, England, Spain, Greece, and finally New Zealand, Majella Cullinane’s ‘A Chronicle of Short Walks and Diversions to the Place of the Green Parrot: Limerick to Paekakariki’ considers both the regrets of dislocation and the joys of relocation. This writer transforms her family story into a kind of symbolic literary pilgrimage.

And there was something galvanised and hypnotic about Jane Williamson’s ‘The Rising Epidemic of Bullying – In All Its Insidious Forms and Guises’. The author possesses a sure sense of verbal rhythms, but her text is not expressly literary, instead it makes itself felt as a field, or arena, of combative anecdotes and complaint-energised assertions.

Many essayists were concerned to express ‘the virtuous’—sermonising or memorialising—but they lacked ‘virtuous prose’, writing that manifested elegance of style, spontaneity of thought, and unsettling perceptions. In the winning essay, ‘Reading a Bad Book Is Like Getting Food Poisoning’ by Elizabeth Smither, one is immediately aware of a writer concerned with refreshing that now contentious phrase ‘the common reader’ (Virginia Woolf’s term). My eye was caught by what read like a bit of personal literary journal, written to amuse its author as much as anyone. It’s a memorable chunk of prose, with the sparkle of rock crystal, arriving at astute and witty observations on bestsellers and book-clubs.


Landfall 224 cover (in which the results are published and will be in bookshops next month)