Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015 · Writing Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers: Judges’ report Jennifer Mills, Tony Birch and Sally Dalton-Brown Judges: Sally Dalton-Brown, Trinity College (Chair); Tony Birch, University of Melbourne; Jennifer Mills, Overland This year, the second Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers attracted a high calibre of entries. The judges – Jennifer Mills of Overland, Tony Birch, University of Melbourne, and Sally Dalton-Brown, Trinity College – unanimously selected Marika Duczynski’s ‘Backa Bourke’ as the winner. Duczynski’s story stood out for its strong voice and richly textured, energetic prose that knows when to withdraw. ‘Backa Bourke’ is a great example of the way short fiction can transmit deep empathy for its characters and offer readers a sense of a complete world beyond the story. The judges also wished to commend two very strong runners-up: Ellen van Neerven’s ‘Cassettes’ takes a common experience and infuses it, in deceptively simple style, with the resonance of many kinds of loss; Jannali Jones’ ‘Ugly Duckling’ imagines the end of the world through an unlikely love story, and shows a writer willing to take risks. Jennifer Mills Jennifer Mills was Overland fiction editor between 2012 and 2018. Her latest novel, The Airways, is out through Picador. More by Jennifer Mills, Tony Birch and Sally Dalton-Brown Tony Birch Tony Birch is the author of Shadowboxing, Father’s Day, Blood, The Promise and Ghost River. He is currently research fellow in the Moondani Balluk Academic Centre at Victoria University. More by Jennifer Mills, Tony Birch and Sally Dalton-Brown Sally Dalton-Brown More by Jennifer Mills, Tony Birch and Sally Dalton-Brown Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 23 February 202324 February 2023 · Writing From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author Rob Horning Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 9 February 202310 February 2023 · Writing Please like, follow and subscribe: the pathos of Patreon Scott Robinson Every Substack page contains a glowing white box just waiting for your email address. This becomes, unavoidably, part of the work being produced. What began as a way to fund work and bring existing ideas into fruition is funnelled by hungry platforms towards an engine of content production that demands we churn out words in structurally-required scripturience. None of this is to denigrate the work of writers, artists and creators supported by such platforms. My point is that we should try and understand the effect these platforms have on the work they claim to enable.
