Ōtepoti resident Ava Reid has been announced as the winner of this year’s Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Her winning essay, ‘Two and a Half Mealworms’, is a collection of reflections and observations. From abandoned cat-shaped bottles of ‘Katy Perry Meow!’ eau de parfum to nameless diaries, lost receipts and old stained flat couches, Reid’s essay is an ode to life’s forgotten or discarded objects and the stories they tell about us.

‘My essay explores the material traces left behind as we move through the world, and the tension at the boundary of public and private looking practices. I found that time can warp what is deemed “acceptable” to look at.’

Currently studying anthropology at Ōtakou Whakaihu Waka, Reid explains that her essay began as a list she kept in the notes app on her phone.

‘The list was intense and often funny, but it started feeling weird, and I wanted to understand why. I started unintentionally, noticing objects left around me at work, and this soon expanded into other areas of my life. I spend a lot of time walking to and from class, past people’s flats and their rubbish on the street.’

Reid hopes that people will come away from this essay with greater awareness of the norms of looking and internal storytelling. She asks, ‘What is okay to look at and explain? When do we pretend we don’t see?’

Judge and Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades was fascinated to see the topics young writers chose to explore in this year’s essay entries.

‘The essays that floated to the top of the entrants this year were all engaged with big ideas: material culture, sea-level rise and climate change, nurturing and navigating relationships in the wake of a global pandemic, immigration and cultural differences, issues of biculturalism in contemporary Aotearoa, female reproductive health.’

She commends Reid for her ability to envision what lost or disregarded objects say about our culture, and what stories these artefacts might tell those who discover them hundreds of years from now.

‘The objects we fill our lives with speak of our own futility, and the act of imagining a world without us to explain their role offers a glimpse of the very futility in which we live.’

‘Many essays fall down simply by trying to tell us how the world works. Reid swims against this grain by taking the traditional essayistic route—the essay as a space of trying to work things out, to notice and to try and make sense of the world. Reid is a writer who is curious, and her essay satisfies in how it shares this curiosity with us. She makes it look easy, which is no easy feat.’

The highly commended essays are ‘Saltwater in our Veins’ by John Sibanda and ‘Let it Kill You a Little’ by Phoebe Robertson.

The Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition is proudly sponsored by Otago University Press, the University of Otago Department of English and Linguistics, and Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

Ava’s winning essay ‘Two and a Half Mealworms’ is featured in Landfall 249, available now.
Landfall 249: Autumn 2029 edited by Lynley Edmeades
Cover art by Tia Ranginui

For more information about Landfall 249 go to oup.nz/landfall249