McCorkell wins 2015 Affirm Press Creative Writing Prize

Tobias McCorkell has won the 2015 Affirm Press Creative Writing Prize for an excerpt from his novel Barely Anything.

McCorkell’s novel, a component of his PhD on contemporary Australian literature, is set in Melbourne and ‘follows the lives of four twenty-somethings through the parties, bars, clubs and city streets of a new millennium’.

The judging committee praised the ‘strong narrative voice and ambition of this multidimensional story, as it explores the tensions between privilege, sex and boredom on both sides of the Yarra River’.

The Affirm Press Creative Writing Prize is awarded annually to a current or recent graduate of the University of Melbourne, with the winner receiving 20 hours of manuscript development assistance from Affirm Press, two editorial meetings and up to six weeks of workspace at the university. Affirm Press has the first right of acceptance of the manuscript.

Suzanne Hermanoczki won the inaugural Affirm Press Creative Writing Prize for Our Fathers, ‘the story of a boy escaping postwar Hungary and, in parallel, his death in Brisbane fifty years later’. A spokesperson for Affirm Press said Hermanoczki was revising her book, which was ‘under consideration and on our editorial team’s radar’.