The alumni winners of Writer 2024, Jessica Leong (right - alumni poetry) and Shona Geary (left - alumni fiction).
A beautiful reflection on the challenges and triumphs of university life has won the alumni poetry section of Writer 2024, the University of Otago’s annual creative writing competition.
Jessica Leong, who completed a MSc in Microbiology in August, won with her poem titled for the competition’s theme “A place of many firsts,” and exploring her University of Otago journey as it was concluding.
Leong says she was thrilled to be named alongside the other category winners:
- Student poetry: George Gearry
- Student fiction: Teala Cavanagh
- Staff poetry: Tautaiolefue Brad Watson
- Staff fiction: Tiffany Young
- Alumni poetry: Jessica Leong
- Alumni fiction: Shona Geary
Read all the winning entries here.
Leong writes under the pen name L. J Xin. She says writing is both a form of self-expression and an outlet for her creativity.
“I was a student in the School of Biomedical Sciences, so you can imagine how scientific and exacting my everyday life was. Poetry allows me to keep in touch with my own soul.”
The entry resonated with this year’s judge, 2024 Burns Fellow Mikaela Nyman, who praised Leong for capturing it all – the good, the bad and the ugly in the life of a young student looking back over their six years in this city.
“Living alone away from home for the first time, sleeping on a ‘sunken mattress’, chasing after their dreams, this poem carries a lot of emotional heft that could easily have become melodramatic in less skilful hands,” she says. “The poem’s narrator gets ‘lost in the mist,’ tries to find ‘the switch / in a crazed desire to succeed,’ loses a loved one, loses themselves, ‘screams under the bridge’ and learns what it means to fail – and yet it is also their ‘first time being free.’ It does sound like the voice of a student who’s had to learn the hard way, but eventually succeeded, a bit wiser and certainly a bit scarred.”
In contrast to Leong, who has just concluded her time at Otago, the winner of the alumni fiction category of Writer 2024, Shona Geary (Taranaki), graduated in 1978.
Geary’s career has been in journalism and communications, with a recent focus on stories and videos for Māori organisations. In June she completed the one-semester creative fiction course at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University – and was inspired to enter Writer 2024 both for the incentive to keep writing and to see how her stories would stack up outside the classroom.
Her story certainly stacked up well – impressing Nyman, who called it “a poignant story that feels contemporary.”
Geary based her winning work on the traditional story about the rivalry of the mountains Pukeonaki and Tongariro, who both loved Pihanga and fought over her – reimagining the narrative and setting it in contemporary Aotearoa.
“Apart from the love story, it traverses indigenous themes of whakapapa, honour, sacrifice and people trying to do the right thing for their whānau and community,” Nyman says.
Geary says Taranaki is her mounga and writing this story was part of her own journey of reconnection and belonging to Taranaki Iwi.
She is thrilled to be named among the winners.
“I am over the moon! It is absolutely lovely to know that others, outside my whānau and classmates, enjoyed reading the story. And it is awesome to have the recognition from my old university, which has produced and supported so many incredible New Zealand writers.”
This is the fifth year the competition has been offered – and once again drew high quality entries from all of the University’s campuses, and from around Aotearoa New Zealand and the world.
Nyman says the thoughtful and varied stories and poems demonstrate the wealth of creative talent in the University of Otago whānau.
“This year’s competition theme, ‘A place of many firsts’, invited an abundance of personal reflections and coming-of-age narratives in both poetry and prose. The subject matter varied immensely, traversing natural disasters, ancestors, encounters with the past and with one’s own cultural heritage, personal growth and failure, and meetings with eccentric local characters. I wish I could have picked more than one winner per category.”
The competition was established in 2019 as part of the University’s 150th celebrations. It is organised by University Publications Editor Lisa Dick and English and Linguistics Programme Senior Teaching Fellow Nicola Cummins and supported by University Book Shop, Otago University Press, Dunedin City of Literature, Otago Access Radio and the Otago Daily Times.