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ReadingRoom

Announcing the winners of New Zealand’s strangest and possibly most awesome writers’ residency award
The winner of the 2023 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award in association with Newsroom and Dick Frizzell is Emma Ling Sidnam.

The Wellington-based, Asian New Zealand writer, whose debut novel Backwaters is published next month by Text in Australia, wins $3000 and seven nights’ accommodation at the Surrey Hotel in Grey Lynn, Auckland, to work on a collection of “weird and wild” short stories.

Miro Bilbrough, a New Zealand writer living in Sydney, has been awarded second place. She receives $1000 and five nights’ accommodation at the Surrey to work on a novel. Her memoir of commune living, In the Time of the Manaroans, published by Victoria University Press in 2020, was named best nonfiction book of that year at ReadingRoom.

Two writers shared third place, and received $500 each plus four nights at the Surrey: Auckland writer Nat Baker, who is working on a novel about revenge (it’s called Revenge), and Rachel Lees of Tauranga, who is writing a memoir of the terrifying year she spent as a secretary to an American cult leader. Maybe it will also be called Revenge.

There are also two runners-up, both Auckland writers, who are awarded four nights at the Surrey, but none of Dick Frizzell’s sponsorship money: short story writer James Pasley and sci-fi novelist Lex Lawler. Both will have to starve unless they time their residency right and can stuff themselves on the hotel’s famous Sunday roast.

The winners were announced just moments ago by Jesse Mulligan on his Afternoons show at Radio New Zealand. They will need to contact Surrey management to time their stay in that mock Tudor establishment with a weird swimming pool but seriously good writing vibes.

Emma Ling Sidnam is the latest winner of the residency award, following writers such as Talia Marshall, Colleen Maria Lenihan, and J Wiremu Kane. She is an award-winning slam poet as well as a prose writer. Her novel Backwater is described by Text as “an exquisite coming-of-age story, Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem for a new generation, examining race, identity and complex family history”.

She will use Surrey to work on a collection of short fiction called Ghost. Alongside James Pasley, the Surrey runner-up, I regard her as the most exciting new short story writer I’ve published in the past few years; several of her stories have appeared at ReadingRoom, including  “XXX” (I think the second or third most-read story in ReadingRoom history) and “Sex Thoughts between 1 am and 2 am 26/08/21”. I first read her work in the anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Alison Wong and Paula Morris, in 2021. Last year she won the 2022 Michael Gifkins Prize, which awarded her the book contract with Text.

She says of her intended short story collection, “I want it to be weird! I like the stories to be disconcerting and maybe a little distressing. Ultimately, I want this collection to be a wild ride.” Story subjects: “Sex with strangers, humans becoming animals, friends eating friends, sexuality crises.” Her characters work in strip clubs and Chinese businesses. “I’m drawing from personal experiences to write about racial fetishization and the othering of Asian women … I’m describing a lot of good, bad, and gay sex. My mother won’t read this book and I’m okay with that. ”

Miro Bilbrough, in second place, is the author of the great book In The Time of the Manaroans, creative nonfiction at its finest and most finely detailed. She has since been awarded writing residencies at the Michael King Writer’s Centre and Godfrey Cheathem Arts Residency, and is now close to the final stage of the manuscript for her novel Spring Ephemeral, “the story of impossible love between Thomas, a young man who wishes to be older, and Nina, an older woman who wishes to be younger”.

In joint third place, Auckland writer Nat Baker will be pleased to leave her chosen writing station – the hallway outside the lifts and the bathrooms at Westgate Library – to rest up in the strangely beautiful confines of the Surrey to work on her novel Revenge, and Rachel Lees will travel to the Grey Lynn hotel from her home in Tauranga to develop her memoir on working with a cult leader who has 16 wives.

James Pasley as runner-up will have four nights at the Surrey to work on his first short fiction collection. I think this guy is great; his story “First Home Buyers” was maybe the best short story to appear in ReadingRoom in 2022. Lex Lawler, the other runner-up, is writing a sci-fi novel titled Audrey 366.

Congratulations to the winners. Sympathies to the longlisted writers, Craig Cliff of Dunedin, Wellington writers Cadence Chung and Isabelle McNeur, JJ Harper of Auckland, Stef Harris of Motueka, and Saige England of New Brighton.

Thanks, too, to everyone who entered the 2023 Surrey Hotel Writers Residency Award in association with Newsroom and Dick Frizzell. There were 123 entries and the standard was blazingly high. As well as complete nobodies there were published authors such as Jane Arthur, Jordan Hamel, Emma Hislop, Josie Shapiro, and Nikki Crutchley. They were in the judge’s top 20 for the Surrey prize, alongside Una Cruickshank, Karl Puschmann, and Isabel Haarhaus.

Writing is a difficult game, with so many setbacks, not least the setbacks of your mind, the torments that what you’re writing is lame, is dull, is of zero interest to zero people. Any kind of reward or recognition can provide an immense boost. I look forward to one day of reading work that will be developed at the Surrey Hotel by Lex Lawler, James Pasley, Rachel Lees, Nat Baker, Miro Bilbrough, and the grand winner, Emma Ling Sidnam.