2018 seems to be my year for collecting awards and trophies.
On the right is my award from the Society of Women Writers Book Awards, which I won for Keeping it in the Family.
On the left is my award for a sonnet, "I Cut the Line" which won the Senior Prize at the Lane Cove Literary Awards. It also received a Highly Commended for the Poetry Award. My sonnet will be published in an anthology early 2019.
Now I need to find somewhere to display these lovely trophies.
On a lighter note, in 2015 I won first prize for my poem, "At a Barbecue by the River" which I had entered in the Peter Cowan Rhyming Poetry Award,
To read it, downloaded it HERE
In 2015, I was fortunate to win the Society of Women Writers Florence Baverstock Non-Fiction Award. This award was to celebrate the Society's 90th Anniversary.
When I thought about the theme for this competition, which was "Giving Women a Voice" I knew who I must write about: my mother, Pauline White, and the work she did, along with many other women, who founded the The Asthma Foundation in the early 1960s.
I was so thrilled to win this award and to have my essay published by the Society of Women Writers in Ink 3, along with other prize winning stories and poetry. It is called "Breathtaking", and was described by the judge, Rebecca Huntley, as standing out among the top entries:
... the story grabs the reader from the start with an evocative yet simply described childhood memory of an adult party with the author on the stairs marveling at the excitement and sophistication of the grownups. The author blends the personal with the political to discuss the history of asthma treatments and how the disease was misunderstood by the medical profession and the public alike.
It can be read HERE