On Reading the Book That Beat Me for the 2016 Text Prize
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In 2016, I entered the then unpublished manuscript of my young adult novel Black Spot in the Text Prize competition for young adult and children’s writing. I wasn’t holding my breath about winning because I’m not the holding-my-breath kind of person. And when I received a blanket email from the Text Prize people thanking everybody for their entries and saying that the shortlisted authors would be contacted individually, I assumed I wasn’t one of them because I hadn’t heard anything.
A couple of days later, my phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number. I thought it might be about a job I’d applied for. Instead it was a woman named Ally, who told me she worked at Text Publishing. She was calling to let me know that Black Spot had been shortlisted for the Text Prize. And to invite me to the announcement of the winner in just under two weeks’ time.
If it sounds like I was very calm during that phone call, I wasn’t. I was stunned. I was overwhelmed. But I was happy. This was an achievement. This was amazing. This was bliss.
From 297 entries, the five shortlisted novels were mine, Eternal by Sarah Bainbridge, Waste by Claire Christian, Never Let Go by James Cooper and Rosebud by Fiona Hardy. And two days before the official announcement, we each received a phone call to let us know if we’d won or not, presumably to avoid those “What the f**k?” or break-down-crying reactions that sometimes happen when you only find out on the night. As I said at the time to my honorary manager, I was bummed that I hadn’t won but I’d get over it. And I have.
At the official announcement party, Claire Christian was announced as the winner and as she gave an impressive speech, I was 1) thankful I hadn’t won because I don’t do public speaking and 2) certain she was going to be a much better marketing proposition for Text Publishing. (Look at her official author portrait; she has blue hair! If that doesn’t say marketer’s dream, then I don’t know what does! Okay, I don’t know much about being a marketer’s dream, if I did I’d be better at it, but Claire seemed to me to be it.)
Towards the end of August 2017, her book was published under the revised title of Beautiful Mess. In September, I bought a copy and in October, I read it (you can read my 4.5-star review here – I sent a message to Claire saying I thought the book was wonderful and I hoped it wasn’t too awkies having someone you’d lost to writing a review of your book and she responded by thanking me, saying it wasn’t awkward and she was glad I had enjoyed it). As of writing this, I can’t find that any of the other books, including mine, have been published yet. One author has found an agent, another is working on a US publisher’s feedback to get it to their standards for publishing and I’m preparing to self-publish.
I was always going to read Claire’s book because 1) it won a writing prize and that’s a pretty great endorsement, 2) I wanted to know what she had done better than me and use it as a learning process, and 3) I’m a little masochistic (but mostly the first two). I’m was very pleased to be able to report that it’s an amazing book because 1) it justifies that it won the Text Prize and 2) I got to write a glowing book review and avoid looking like a sore loser.
It struck me, though, that there were quite a few similarities in our books. Explorations of death, the tricky time of being a teenager, identity, power, relationships with parents, relationships with significant others (friends and lovers) and mental health (specifically depression). There were also two big differences. Claire had approached her story from a place of realism, pure gritty realism, while I had written a piece of escapist fiction. And it was clear that she spent a lot of time with real teenagers. If I didn’t have a sister twenty years younger than me and a teenage niece and nephew, I wouldn’t have spoken to a teenager in decades, pretty much since I was one.
One thing that was really reinforced for me was that books aren’t really the kind of thing that can be definitively ranked as better or worse. They’re not like science tests and they can’t be objectively marked correct or incorrect out of a hundred. The reason that both of our books were shortlisted was because they were both good. Her book isn’t better than mine. It just spoke more clearly and more powerfully to the people at Text Publishing. It was closer to what they were looking for, something that neither of us could have known about, so in the end it was a bit of a crapshoot in that respect.
And the other thing is that I haven’t really been beaten. My book still exists. It will be published. It will be read. My success will come differently and later than Claire’s but it will still come. Her book is fantastic. And my book was good enough to be shortlisted with it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
