Women win all prizes in Mansfield awards

Press, 16 October 1981, Page 8

Women win all prizes in Mansfield awards

PA Wellington A Northland author, Daphne De Jong, has been named winner of the 1981 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Literary Award .; ;

Ms De Jong, of Maungatapere near Whangarei, won the biennal award of $5OO with her entry, “Dying Light,” , a short story of the recollections of an old woman in a rest home.

The competition’s judge, Mr Peter Stewart, who is the. editor of the “Listener,” said that the story had a “strong sense of humanity" and “unity of construction.”

Women writers won all four prizes in the competition, the winners of which were announced by the chairman of the bank’s board of directors, Mr L. N. Ross, on the 93rd anniversary of

Katherine Mansfield’s birth. For the first time in the award’s 23-year history, a second prize of $250, was awai*ded. It went to Alice Gleday, of Palmerston North, for her entry, “Ghosts,’’which is set in Canada. Mrs Gleday was the first woman to win the main award 11 years ago. The novice writers’s award of $250 was won by Helen McGrath of Nelson for her entry; “A Motto For Her Dying.” Angie Harewira, of Taupo, a pupil of Tauponuiatia College won the young writers’s award of $l5O, and a similar grant to her school’s library with a moving story of a Maori funeral entitled “E Ma.”

The novice writers’s section was judged by a novelist, Joy Cowley, and the young writers’s section was judged by a publisher, Ms Judy Siers.