Winners of 2017 Affirm Press Mentorship Award announced

The winners of this year’s Affirm Press Mentorship Award have been announced.

The winning authors and their work are:

• ‘Inheritance’ by Kathryn O’Connor, a novel about ‘Eileen and Anita, who have never met, yet are connected in the most intimate of ways by a DNA fault-line that cuts deeper than either could have imagined’. It comprises ‘two stories, one set in suburban Malvern in 1943, the other in present day Melbourne, run parallel to each other sharing themes of familial love, genetics, and the threat of violence both in the world and in the body’.
• ‘From Here to There’ by Edita Mujkic, a memoir of war-time Bosnia, when Mukkic, a young mother, ‘must make the terrifying decision to leave her husband behind and make the perilous journey to safety with her two young children’. Mujkic tells of ‘being held hostage by the Serb para-army, scrambling to survive with no money and little food, and the agonising 600 days she spent away from her husband’ in a ‘true story of courage and humanity’.
• ‘The Grand Pacific’ by Kerry Littrich, a novel set in ‘the bohemian 70s’, which follows ‘beautiful fifteen-year-old Estella Jones, who lives with her alcoholic mother in “The Grand Pacific”, a run-down hotel by the beach in Coogee’. After ‘giving birth to a still-born baby, the result of rape, Estella buries the body in the sand dunes and flees, hoping to keep her shame secret. Returning years later as a wealthy and enigmatic woman, Estella buys the crumbling hotel in an effort to make amends for the past and create a connection to her lost child’.

The authors will work with senior editor Ruby Ashby-Orr and editor Cosima McGrath, who will provide manuscript development and feedback, as part of a week’s residency at Varuna, the National Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains.

Category: Local news