Winners announced, anthology launched for 2024 Newcastle Short Story Award

The Hunter Writers’ Centre (HWC) has announced Omar Musa and Lisa Lang as the winners of the 2024 Newcastle Short Story Award.

Omar Musa, a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist, rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, NSW, won both first and second prize for his stories ‘Langsat’ and ‘Boogeyman’ respectively. Lisa Lang, a Melbourne-based author, received third prize for her story ‘Body Memory’.

As the winner, Musa receives $3,000, as well as the second prize of $1,500, while Lang receives the third prize of $500. The awards also include a highly commended entry prize of $200 (which went to Jay McKenzie for ‘Gull Mother’) and the HWC members’ prize of $500 (which went to Moran Seres for ‘The Rain’). Two local awards were also announced, going to Peter Rodgers for ‘One Last Flirtation’ and Ned Stephenson for ‘Blood on the Sand’.

Winners were chosen from over 500 entries. All winning and shortlisted entries are included in the 2024 Newcastle Short Story Award Anthology.

‘Reading the many entries for this competition was a joy, and the great quantity of submissions is testimony to a collective love of the form,’ said judges Pitaya Chin and Catherine McNamara. ‘The stories we selected for the anthology are those that transported us somewhere … and performed the age-old trick of making us better see ourselves, or question ourselves, or regard others with an enlightened eye.’

Of his winning entry, Musa said: ‘“Langsat” is fiction but is based on a scary experience that happened to me after my first (and last) kickboxing fight in Kota Kinabalu. It got me thinking deeply about issues like statelessness in Sabah, entrenched inequality and injustice, migration, violence, chance, and at times insurmountable gaps in understanding. I wanted the reader to experience a form of vertigo, just like the characters do.’

More information about the award and anthology is available on the HWC website.

Category: Awards Local news