Peter Newall lives and works in Sydney, where he was born. In the northern winter he travels by train through the border cities of central and eastern Europe, where he sits in jazz clubs and regrets the loss of the Habsburg empire. He speaks halting French and German, and plays the double bass poorly. His favourite musicians are Tomasz Stańko and Glenn Gould; he reads and re-reads everything written by Ivan Turgenev, Joseph Roth and Thomas Bernhard.
First Prize: I Thought About You
“A beautiful lyrically written journey on a train and into the past, with rhythms that allow us to cross into the internal reflective world of the traveller and back out again into the evoked landscape…”
Matthew Asprey is a writer from Sydney. In 2004 he hosted a weekly jazz program on Gosford community radio, and has reviewed festivals, albums, and Sydney gigs for the Jazz Australia website. He recently completed a comic novel, Lewis is Robbed, which has been excerpted in Island; other short stories have appeared there and in various publications such as Total Cardboard. He teaches creative writing at Macquarie University.
Second Prize: Gut Bucket Blues
“Funny, gutsy… would make a great short film.”
Spike Mason spends a large portion of his time telling stories. He does this with either improvised music or words, and has come to believe that the two activities are on a similar path. He also spends time reading autobiographies, and has discovered that it is often what a writer has left out of a story that prompts the most thought.
Third Prize: Taking the A Train
“Irreverent comedy, a laugh-out-loud story…”
