Chow wins 2021 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction

Keshe Chow has won the 2021 Lip magazine Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction for her story ‘Lady Finger’.

Judge Nicola Redhouse said Chow’s story ‘achieved a wonderful balance of surprise, curious specificity and magic realist delight’.

‘Here, the writer marries the migrant-returning-home experience with pure and unadulterated myth, making both forms new again,’ said fellow judge Vivian Pham ‘The structure of the story enfolds the reader and takes us home, unexpectedly, to the moon.’

Chow receives a $1000 cash prize and a collection of books from the award’s sponsors. The winning story will be published on the Lip website, alongside second-place winner Kerrin O’Sullivan’s story ‘Mansion’ and third place winner Tanya Vavilova’s ‘Here I Am’.

The winners were chosen from a shortlist of 11 by Lip’s editorial team as well as judges Pham, Redhouse and Adalya Nash Hussein.

In its ninth year, the prize is open to women, female-identifying and non-binary writers, and is held in honour of Lip’s late founding editor, Rachel Funari. Writers were invited to submit up to 2000 words of unpublished and unperformed fiction that engaged with the theme ‘homecoming’.

Category: Awards Local news