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Three of the country’s top writers were recognised at the 27th annual Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards at Fables Gallery in Auckland.

Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards 2011

The Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards are on the 28th October 2010 and the huge number of entries have been whittled down to the top ten, thanks to our Open Division judge Charlotte Grimshaw. We now need your help in deciding the winner of the People’s Choice Award.

SUNDAY STAR-TIMES SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2010 TERMS & CONDITIONS

Open Division Judge Elizabeth Smithers Comments: 'At first I thought I might have been drawn to the winning story since I was a librarian (without wings). But what really captured me was the Betjeman-like bounce of lisping tennis-playing Jane. And when Shelley rejects mysterious Stanley it is because ‘there was an aura about him that reminded me of shiny paper sewing patterns slipping through my fingers’. I stopped for a moment and thought of those patterns.’

Congratulations to the top 10 finalists in the Open and Secondary Schools categories of the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards.

Enter the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards.

The Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards 2009 (in association with Random House) terms and conditions:

Harris Williamson was the Secondary School Division winner with his story A Single Man.

This is the end that justified the means: this tour, this circuit of corporate bodies. This is what he’s done since the launch of his book: powerpoints for the business sector, motivating speeches on targets, incentives, the driven uncompromising optimism of top-achievers. Of course, he covers her accident, briefly, her determination not to turn the group from its course, to deviate from the goals of the expedition: the adversities that strike are opportunities, they distinguish the attitudes of overcomers. It was a code she supported. She followed the principles to the end, never abandoned the team’s objective once. She had the heart-muscle of a hero, would not consider jeopardizing the higher mission. She weighed the odds, the factors, stayed rational, dispassionate; she did not expect her gender to tip the scales, to plead for special treatment. She had set out into an environment beyond known values, she’d crossed a great distance to put herself beyond limits, beyond the workings of sentiment, the narrow bonds of the norm. There is no ‘I’ in team. He gives her airtime. He gives her the oxygen she could no longer grasp when he left her at that altitude, fused into her frozen shelf. She was fractured, alone, but she did not go to pieces. Her knife-edge decision had been made, he says, she knew it was touch and go.
  But I wonder how she surveyed his face, as he did go, I wonder if he paused to touch her, whether she panned his look for pity, that pinprick vision at the centre of his eyes, their bluewhite straits. Or whether she just lay and listened to the hiss and crack of a continent, its endless disinterest.

Unwrapping the gifts

Andre Ngapo was the Open Division winner with his story Te Pou.

Eleanor Catton was the open division winner of the 2007 Sunday Star-Times Short Story competition for her story Necropolis.

“Hemingway has moments of genius,” I said. “Like when he talks about the shell exploding when he has taken his ambulance to the front and he says it is as if a furnace door was opened for a second – I don’t know what wars are like, or shells, or explosions but I know the heat and roar of a furnace and the way he writes that one tiny thing makes me feel it.”
Oliver rubbed at his chin and smiled. “What else? Tell me something else.” He sipped his wine. Talking about writers makes me feel intelligent.” He laughed.
“Well, I wanted to tell you, to break it to you.. that Tolstoy was a woman. He writes things that no man could possibly know, things that no woman I think even realises until she sees them written and then she knows they are true.”

‘Listen to me,’ he said. He put his hand on Soraya’s; she shrunk slightly from his touch. ‘You have to tell your parents. You just have to. Ask them to forgive you.  You’re their flesh and blood, they have a right to know.’

She gets a park right by the cafe, and as she turns the key to shut off the ignition the wind takes over from the engine noise. She stares out at the grey-blue surf hurling itself in from Cook Strait, foaming the beach. The sand, littered with pebbles and seaweed and fragments of wood and plastic that the ocean throws up, is a grey that always looks dirty. This beach never sparkles in the sunshine, not unless you look past the grey sand and out at the breakers and through the mist and distance that draw your eyes south, unable to see it but knowing that, just there, just round the corner, is the South Island. If a rip carried you out, directly south from this dirty sand, it’d take you all the way to Antarctica before you hit land. There are safer beaches in Wellington; prettier, benign. But this is the beach she comes to, this winter, to walk the dirty grey sand and endure the wind and be just a hidden current away from the bottom of the world
The cafe was gutted by fire the week she had her accident, so it feels as if they’ve healed together, Iris and the cafe, since it’s been rebuilt and reopened for business. It’s glossy and fresh again now, fire-engine red on fatty cream paint startling against the grey-blue of the ocean and the sky. When she was well enough, after it reopened, she’d skirted warily around the cafe on her first few visits to the beach, before finally climbing the skinny stairs towards the noise of mothers and babies, and thin people she recognised from the television, and coffee and suits and music and surfers. What hooked her when she got there – hooked all of them, everyone in the room – was the view through the big window. If you sat far enough back in the room, the window frame obscured the dirty grey beach and showed only the rollers, the breakers, the sky, the mist; that restoring, fluid blue.

Classes started in June. The first lecture for Evolution was on the Red Queen Hypothesis. Alice, Daniel and I weren’t early and sat somewhere near the middle of the lecture theatre. The lecturer was a tall, thin man with oversized limbs. He looked a bit like a giant, spindly bird. While he was waiting for everyone to arrive and stop talking he strutted along the runway at the front of the lecture theatre – his black silhouette outlined against the projector.

Of course I’d realised early on that Ella wasn’t writing autobiography. It wasn’t as simple as that. She would have only been a child when Sophie, her first heroine, spends the night fire watching and next day falls asleep on the Heath, under a sky of barrage balloons, to be woken by an awareness of Hector Marsham, her deceptively ingenuous nemesis, the second before he enters her life, throwing himself down on the grass and offering her a cigarette.

Mary Dennis, of Wellington High School, took first place in the secondary school division of the 2007 competition.

In winter the house shivers in the wind. She can hear the glass rattling in its frames and the whistling as it shoots through the gaps in the walls and doors.
Beneath her thick woollen jacket she feels the ice in her bones.
Knitting? Her husband says, what on earth are you knitting for?
Orphans, she replies. The woman’s church group are knitting for orphans and unwanted children.
Hmmmmmph, he says. I’m going to the pub.
The woman doesn’t answer. She sits and knits in the darkening room.
The following morning is tired, grey and curling at the edges; air heavy with fatigue as the woman walks. The old house has lost some of its weatherboards, holes gaping like missing teeth.  She winds the scarf through the twisted wire of the front fence, its bright red like a wound.
Around the letterbox she ties the strings of the hat and bundles into the slot several pairs of socks.
She doesn’t dare leave a note. In fact, for the first time, she leaves as soon as she is done, hurrying away as fast as her thick winter skirts will let her.
It is a Saturday and the next day her husband is home. They play rummy and visit some friends.
On Sunday they go to church and help organise the collection. On the Monday her husband’s boss comes around and she spends all day cooking lamb, baking peach cobbler, moving all the paper gathering dust on the unused table, and practising conversation.
So it is the next Tuesday she visits the old house. If possible it looks more forlorn.
She stares at the broken window and feels her heart crack.
In the letterbox is a little scrap of folded-up paper.
Goodbye Mum, it says
Don’t call anymore.