Higgins wins 2015 Ray Koppe Young Writers’ Residency

Wollongong writer Chloe Higgins has won the Australian Society of Authors (ASA)’s 2015 Ray Koppe Young Writers’ Residency for her novella ‘Infomercials for Mixing Bowls and Treadmills’.

Higgins’ winning novella is ‘a study of the “suffocating effect” of trauma and heroin addiction … a dramatic and confronting account, structured through a retelling of the same scene, accreting the reader’s and the protagonist’s understanding about facing the past, the painful present and an uncertain future’.

The residency offers one week’s stay at Varuna, The Writers House in Katoomba, NSW to an unpublished writer under 30.

Four manuscripts were also commended by the judges: Fiona Burrows’ ‘The Cut Out Stars’, an illustrated children’s book about a grandmother and her grandson; Robbie Arnott’s ‘The Floor is Lava’, an ‘exploration of masculinity through the travails of a young man … learning to live a meaningful life in contemporary Australia’; Stephen Smith’s ‘Sweet Boronia’, fictionalised stories of his great-grandfather’s life and work as a writer and poet; and ‘Renascence’ by Lyn Dickens, a ‘study of racism, identity, colonisation, violence—and redemption’ told through multiple narratives and points of view.

For more information about the residency and the winning and commended manuscripts, visit the ASA website here.

Category: Local news