In 2022, the Furphy Literary Award attracted over 600 short story entries. The theme was ‘Australian Life in all its diversity’, and this volume – comprising the winning story, as well as the highly commended and shortlisted pieces – exhibits the wide range of approaches to this topic.
The winning story, Art and Life by Cate Kennedy, examines the idea of performativity. Kennedy, a writer and poet, has previously won and been shortlisted for a variety of writing awards, including for her novel, The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the 2010 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
The plot of Art and Life revolves around Daniel, a young man whose parents and mentors have trained him to become a professional violinist, to the detriment of his social and inner life. Once Daniel arrives at university, however, he begins to break through the expectations placed upon him. Busking for extra cash, he is shocked to discover that passers-by are more impressed by the performativity of performance, than the performance itself.
Soon he abandons the violin altogether, dropping it to moonlight as a living statue. Daniel comes to realise with ‘a wave of liberating, cathartic bitterness’ that he hates the violin. ‘The constraints of it,’ he exclaims, ‘compared to the emancipation of the body as its own instrument!’ The story takes some unexpected twists, and is rich with absurd details. A mix of tragedy and comedy, Art and Life is a worthy winner of the Furphy Literary Award.
The highly commended entries are peopled with characters alive with conflicted emotions. In Lisa Moule’s The Game, a teacher reckons with an unruly student and pompous colleagues. Natalie Vella’s Winter is for Regret is an intriguing study of age, loneliness, grief and missed opportunities.
The shortlisted stories are very different from one another, each offering a different interpretation of the competition’s theme. Isabella Ballestrin’s story, 00.00, is a taut work. Told from the perspective of a girl whose mother has begun dating a strange and unappealing man, this piece is full of psychosexual tension. Ballestrin adroitly sets 00.00 in a suburbia crowded with unspoken horror. Thick tomato sauce and blood blend with the oppressive heat of summer midnights, to form a story that lingers in the mind of the reader.
Daniel Alwan’s story, Sunshine, is a standout from the shortlisted works. Set during the 2005 Cronulla riots, it follows two young men reckoning with race and sexuality. Alwan, a queer Australian-Lebanese writer, is cinematic in his scope. In his hands, Cronulla is described as a ‘strait-laced coastal suburb where peroxide and teeth-whitener are always in abundance; where mostly middle-class, mostly white, nuclear families picnic and recline and rinse and repeat’.
Anxiety and violence seethe and overflow within the piece, as do the complexities of race and desire. Young men, ‘their torsos shimmering, sticky with sweat and specks of beer’, surge and shout in this vividly painted story. Sunshine is a beautifully compressed and sharp piece of short fiction.
Read: Exhibition review: I have not loved (enough or worked)
The Furphy Anthology 2022 offers a complex range of styles and storylines for readers to enjoy; the mix of emerging and established writers evident in the anthology illustrates the ways in which the competition showcases Australian life, in all its diversity.
The Furphy Anthology 2022
Publisher: Hardie Grant
ISBN: 9781743799536
Pages: 250pp
Publication Date: 14 November 2022
RRP: $35.00
