Winner—LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize 2021
by the Liminal Team
From the Judges
Essayistic writing, whether semi-fictional or factional or factual, whether in the form of a memoir or of diaristic self-documentation, should allow itself to be provocative, thoughtful, and in a way, textually playful. While one can employ the rubric of originality, cohesion and expression, the judges were also looking for something insightful and unclassifiable: a montage, perhaps, of an interior truth and an understated empathy rather than sentimentality or too much subjectivity.
This is what a nonfiction prize should be assuming: in other words, a translation of the writing process itself from the unconscious to a dramatic but cognitive articulation.
Overall, it was an embarrassment of riches. Those who didn’t make the grand final will enter the archives as brilliant and insightful essays that will strike a chord with many readers. In the end, such was the quality that the judges could not split the two runners-up. It is recommended they both be accorded equal status.
ANNOUNCING THE 2021 LIMINAL & Pantera Press
NonFICTION PRIZE WINNER
Congratulations to Hassan Abul, the winner of the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize. Hassan wins $10,000 and publication in our forthcoming anthology with Pantera Press.
Judges Brian Castro, Maddee Clark & Shakira Hussein, commented:
Winner — Hassan Abul, “third cowboy from the sun”
This essay is quite beautiful and funny. It has a very talented writerly voice and is a cohesive piece which doesn’t try to ‘do too much’. It combines an interesting study of a film, Y tu mamá también (English: And Your Mother Too), which is a road movie as well as a coming-of-age film that documents a particular moment in its characters’ lives and times. In like manner, Third Cowboy from the Sun moves nicely between precise description and thoughtful incision, between documentation and self-reflection, between a film review and a self-analysis. The vexed state of transitioning is mirrored with humour as well as irony: it is about being seen and about seeing, both of which require a distance, which works excellently as a technique of narrative expression. Creative, provocative, and thoughtful, it is both a rare and courageous objectification of a self as well as a key analytic moment in one narrator’s life and times.
ANNOUNCING THE 2021 LIMINAL & Pantera Press
NonFICTION PRIZE runners-up
Congratulations to Mykaela Saunders and André Dao, the runners-up to the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize. Each writer will receive $1000, and publication in our anthology with Pantera Press.
Judges Brian Castro, Maddee Clark and Shakira Hussein commented:
Runner-up—Andrè Dao
“Five Stele in Commemoration of Forgetting”
This is a thought-provoking essay. Worthy in its informative role, it also emphasises that the techniques of telling contain the pitfalls of selective memory and forgetting. There is a rhythm here, a drumbeat of rote and emotion in combination with analysis. It is an objective survey filled with subjective experience, which makes truth-telling so necessary for non-fictional narrative. It is touching; it sticks in the mind like stones and provokes thought with a strong critical voice, engaging the ‘archive’ without straying too much into a dense academic voice. This compelling piece is a memoir-testimony about testimonies, articulating the process of oral history when violence goes undocumented. It is tense and gripping; ambitious, layered, and complex.
Runner-up—Mykaela Saunders
“Communing with Uncle Kev”
“Communing with Uncle Kev” speaks very powerfully on the topic of archive: what is included, what is excluded, and what is protectively and lovingly withheld from archival records and public exposure. Reminding us that 'the archive is not neutral', the essay provides us with an account of archival uses and misuses, before describing a moment of unexpected and joyful archival discovery. The archive may not be neutral, but it is a storehouse for memory nonetheless, and memory offers a means of connection and continuity.
