Airini Beautrais has been named the winner of the
2016 Landfall Essay Competition for her essay ‘Umlaut’.
Competition judge David Eggleton said that her
essay stood out as ‘written by someone unwilling to be boring, willing to take
risks, and enough of a seasoned practitioner to carry it off with sustained
verve’:
‘Umlaut’ is dextrous, exuberant
and comical, if sardonic. It’s an account of the vexing business of unusual
names and the thorny encounters they can provoke in this country with
bureaucracy, with the insular-minded, with the proudly ignorant. It’s about the
absurdities of modern life: how we negotiate otherness, how we negotiate our
constantly revised colonial heritage on a daily basis. Sometimes verging on
slapstick, nevertheless it’s a tour de force of a kind.
Airini Beautrais
says she had thought that the umlaut in her children’s surname would make a good
subject for a poem: ‘But the notes I put together seemed to lend
themselves to an essay. As I wrote it and considered the issues around
names, language and culture I found a lot of anger surfaced, but also a
lot of humour. I was surprised how emotional this piece of writing became for
me.’
Airini has
published three books of poetry: Secret Heart (2006, winner
of the NZSA Jessie Mackay award for best first book of poetry at the 2007
Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Western Line (2011) and Dear Neil Roberts (2014, longlisted for
the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards). She holds
a PhD in Creative Writing from the International
Institute of Modern Letters and her poetry and short fiction has
appeared in a range of print and online journals. In 2016 she was shortlisted
for the Sarah Broom poetry prize. Airini lives in Whanganui with her partner
and two children.
The Landfall
Essay Competition is judged ‘blind’ by Landfall
editor David Eggleton. The winner receives $3000 and a year’s subscription to Landfall. There were 51
essays submitted for the 2016 competition.
Michalia Arathimos came second, and third place
went to Carolyn Cossey. The three essays will be published in
Landfall 232 in November.
For further details about the competition
visit:
http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/authors/awards/otago065482.html
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