PRESS RELEASE
SBS has today named Tessa Piper the winner of its annual SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition for her work ‘The Usual’.
Piper, a 37-year-old public servant from Melbourne, takes out the $5000 first prize for her entry described by competition judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas as ”a compelling story of family dysfunction that was both raw and powerful”.
Now in its third year, the SBS Emerging Writers Competition is an initiative from SBS Voices designed to uncover bold new voices that reflect the diversity of contemporary Australia.
Aspiring writers are invited to share their memoir stories of up to 2000 words, for a chance to win prizes and have their work published in an anthology. This year’s theme was ‘Emergence’ and invited a wide range of entries on everything from birth to overcoming illness and emerging from complex life circumstances.
“We are immensely proud of the SBS Emerging Writers’ competition which helps bring great talent to the fore,” said Kathryn Fink, Director of Television. “This initiative gives diverse and undiscovered writers an opportunity to tell powerful stories each year around a different key theme, and we’ve seen it go from strength to strength each year since the competition was launched in 2020.”
Winner Tessa Piper’s unsettling yet beautifully rendered tale of childhood trauma was two decades in the making.
“I actually wrote the first draft 20 years ago,’’ she said.
Upon seeing an ad for the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, something “just clicked” and she wrote her entry ‘The Usual’ in one sitting.
Judges Alice Pung and Christos Tsiolkas, both award-winning authors, described her story as “a punch to the face and guts with a stolen diamond-studded glove”.
“This story was a real outlier, in terms of voice, pacing, perspective and artistic risk,’’ they noted.
Pung said both judges felt so compelled upon first reading, that they came back to the piece multiple times.
“Each re-reading yielded some small new gem, whether it be lines like ‘I can turn windows into mirrors’, or disconcerting images of staring at zigzag stitching on buttonholes of strange men. Some scenes gave us the heebie-jeebies, some scenes made our hearts beat faster, and some left us in shock and awe. This is a story full of urgent vitality; artistically rendered in a truly affecting way that is without artifice.”
Piper, who was at the local swimming pool with her children when she received the news of her win, described it as “mind blowing”.
“Up until now I hadn’t allowed myself to think of my writing as more than just files on my computer, something I did for fun and occasionally shared with family and friends,’’ she said.
“But if I’m honest with myself, having people read and connect with my writing is a dream I’d never allowed myself to engage with properly until now.”
Assyrian-Australian writer Monikka Eliah took out the runner-up prize and was awarded $3000 for her piece ‘Cabbage’ which told of a child lost in a supermarket and was described by the judges as “astonishingly confident”.
This year the judges also chose three Highly Commended entries, which each won a prize of
$1000. The Highly Commended entries were Gemma Tamock for ‘Call and Response’, Alexander Burton for ‘The Lanyard is my Superpower’, and Sidney Norris for ‘Cicada’.
All the entries have been published on the SBS Voices website.
Judges Pung and Tsiolkas congratulated all the winners and entrants on the quality of work in this year’s competition.
“It was an absolute delight to judge this competition with Christos. The quality of the shortlisted stories was outstanding. Each piece took us into a different world, peopled with characters and realities both familiar and foreign to us,” said Pung.
Tsiolkas was similarly impressed.
“[Alice and I] were united in seeking that voice that we have not heard before, or one that retells a familiar tale in a new way,” he said. “It’s been a joy to be part of this process and I want every single writer to know that we took your work seriously and that we were impressed and gladdened by the power and breadth of the stories we read.”
Thirty shortlisted entries from this year’s competition will be considered for inclusion in an official anthology of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition, published by Hardie Grant in 2023.
This follows the official anthology of the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition Between Two Worlds, which was published in August 2022.
