Prichard wins 2025 Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize
In Aotearoa New Zealand, literary journal Landfall Tauraka has announced Tasmin Prichard as the winner of this year’s Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize for their essay “Four Hours in the Dark, Forgetting”, a “quiet and intimate retelling of their experience undergoing gender-affirming top surgery”.
Judge Tina Makereti described the essay as “taut, succinct, eloquent and poignant”.
“It stayed with me through many weeks and successive readings,” Makereti said. “Sometimes I think essay is about making arguments, but this one taught me an essay can be a thing that cuts through all argument. Instead, it simply says, Here is something I have lived through. Here is something you can’t know except by living it, but perhaps if I can distil it down to this pure form you can know something about it too.”
Prichard worked as a senior consultant at Draper Cormack Group and an advisor in communications at the Wellington Pride Festival. They are also the co-chair of the Wellington Pride Festival board.
They said, “I wanted to write about gender-affirming care with as little capital-p politics as possible. Trans bodies are the site of constant discourse and political violence. Gender-affirming healthcare has been reduced to talking points and weaponised in the modern culture wars and the backlash against increasing trans visibility has been vicious.
“Constantly, trans people are given the message their bodies and lives are factoids, things to be wielded. This is damaging by itself. We just want to be able to pay rent, hang with our mates, not be hate–crimed, and have enough money to buy DJ equipment. It’s bananas to me that everyone and their dog feels entitled to an opinion about trans people. The trans body is no more inherently political than anyone else’s.”
Prichard’s essay appears in Landfall Tauraka 250: Spring 2025.
Rachel Buchanan was awarded second place for “Crossing”; Stacey Kokaua-Balfour and Ariana Tikao both shared third place for their stories “Ina’s Shark and Other Stories” and “Kihikihi Wawā: Cycles of transformation and renewal” respectively; and both Olivia Pham and Katie Lane received a highly commended award for ‘Substitutions for Home’ and ‘Strange Ruptures’ respectively.
More information is available on the Te Whare Tā o Ōtakou Whakaihu Waka (Otago University Press) website.
Category: Awards Local news
