Martin Edmond and Tze Ming Mok are the winners of the 2004 Landfall Essay Prize, it was announced today.

Judge Vincent O'Sullivan says, 'A good essay picks up on the times when it was written; it is a form that tells us what it is to be contemporary. - '
Martin Edmond and Tze Ming Mok are the winners of the 2004 Landfall Essay Prize, it was announced today.

Judge Vincent O'Sullivan says, 'A good essay picks up on the times when it was written; it is a form that tells us what it is to be contemporary. - '
Each of these essays tells me about the country I live in and come from in ways that are fresh and challenging. I was taken with Martin Edmond's sophistication and deft intellectual turns. Tze Ming Mok had a drilling eye for what it is to begin as an outsider, and a sharp assessment of what the inside implies and excludes'.

In his essay 'The Abandoned House as a Refuge for the Imagination', Martin Edmond explores the rich imaginative source of old houses, of his past and of artist Philip Clairmont and writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson.

Tze Ming Mok explores belonging in 'Race You There'. Her essay looks at being Asian in New Zealand - the encounters of racism and colour-blindness and the need for Asian communities to address the Treaty of Waitangi.

'It was terrific to have the form's most stylish local exponent judge this year's competition', says Landfall editor Justin Paton. 'The winners that Vincent O'Sullivan chose do what essays do best: they focus a passion and pursue a question.'

Martin Edmond and Tze Ming Mok will share the $2,500 prize sponsored by Landfall's publisher, University of Otago Press. Their winning entries are published in Landfall 208, along with shortlisted entries from Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jessica LeBas, Tim Corballis and Ian Wedde.

This was the fourth Landfall Essay Competition. Former Landfall editor Chris Price initiated the essay competition in 1997 to build on Landfall's tradition of publishing sustained, creative and critical essays.

Author information

Martin Edmond is a writer, screenwriter and poet, and is the 2004 Writing Fellow at University of Auckland. His work includes The Autobiography of My Father, The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont and Chronicle of the Unsung.

Tze Ming Mok's poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared in various journals, including the last two issues of Landfall. After she submitted her entry to the Landfall essay competition, a National Front member attacked several Somali youths with a baseball bat in her Wellington suburb of Newtown. She subsequently organised a peaceful march to Parliament against racism and hate crimes, attended by several thousand people.

Vincent O'Sullivan's many works have received wide acclaim, including most recently On Longing (part of the Montana Estate essay series) and Long Journey to the Border, a biography of John Mulgan. His latest book of poems is Nice Morning for It, Adam, published by Victoria University Press. In June, he was awarded the $100,000 Creative New Zealand Michael King fellowship to write a collection of short stories and two novels.

Landfall 208
new age
Edited by Justin Paton
ISBN 1 877276 87 1
RRP $29.95