A short story entitled Dr. Lung has earned Kelowna writer Ashley Little first place in the 10th annual Okanagan Short Story Contest.
“Dr. Lung is a fine, funny-sad piece of work, fueled by the weird energy of grief, guided along the twisted path of healing,” said contest judge John Gould. “What grips us here is the intimate voice of this young narrator, its perfectly calibrated mixture of insight and innocence.”
The top three stories were announced Saturday evening at a public reading and awards presentation at the Laurel Building in Kelowna. Little received the $500 first prize. Second prize of $200 went to Susan Buis of Kamloops for her story, The Half Hour Pose, and the $100 third prize went to Dawn Kennedy of Vernon forOwl’s Pawn.
Gould described Buis’s The Half Hour Pose as “beautiful prose, as intricately dense as a human body,” and said Kennedy’s Owl’s Pawn presented “flair for characterization, and for fine details drawn from the worlds of nature and culture.”
This year’s Okanagan Short Story Contest drew 159 entries. In addition to the three winners, the following Okanagan writers made it to the final stage of the judging process:
- Jan Crerar of Salmon Arm
- Brian d’Eon of Nelson
- Karen Hofmann of Kamloops
- Patrick Roscoe of Keremeos
- Sharon Taylor of Williams Lake
- Lorna Tureski of Armstrong
- Shelley Wood of Kelowna
Winners and finalists will receive chapbooks of the winning stories.
Contest sponsors are UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, CBC Radio One, and the Central Okanagan Foundation.
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