This year’s Furphy Literary Awards were announced at a virtual ceremony on Saturday night with Melbourne writer, Ruby Todd taking the open prize for a story about events in a woman’s tumultuous life culminating in the HMAS Melbourne – Voyager disaster.
Two other works were highly commended by the judging panel in the open category, which received a total of 850 entries from across Australia and overseas.
Furphy Literary Award director Sam Furphy said that the quality of the shortlisted and finalist entries was very pleasing.
The junior awards were won by students at Goulburn Valley Grammar School.
Year 12 student, Elly Miechel won the Youth Short Story prize and year 5 student, Lila Plunkett won the Junior Short Story prize.
Elly’s wrote her story through the eyes of a French family aboard the Titanic, moments before it sank. Her inspiration for the story came from visiting an exhibition in Melbourne and her fascination with the colossal waste of human life.
Lila’s story was centred around her love of the bush. It concerned a young girl and her dad trekking through the bush to visit a cave and being trapped with a sudden rock slide.
The girls both expressed a love of writing that they intend to continue into the future. Their stories have been republished on The Adviser website.
The finalist entries from each category will be available to read from Sunday 26th July on the Furphy Literary Awards website. The Furphy Literary Award is working towards an annual publication of an anthology of selected works from entries submitted each year FLA director, Adam Furphy said.
