We are delighted to announce Caitlin McGregor as the winner of the inaugural KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize, for their essay ‘Hungry Little DisHuman Beings’!
‘Hungry Little DisHuman Beings’ is an illustrated essay about changelings, autistic poetics, and the relationship of disability to the category of ‘human being’. Drawing from a range of sources—including folklore, disability studies, queer theory, psychiatric reports, contemporary witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, and literature by autistic writers—this essay argues for the radical creative potential of a para-normal positionality.
Read Caitlin’s winning essay here.
Caitlin McGregor writes, paints, edits, and reads. Their work has appeared in a range of publications, including Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, The Guardian, The Big Issue, Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks, and Australian Book Review. They are about to start a PhD on autistic poetics. Caitlin lives on the unceded land of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, to whom they pay their deepest respects.
Judge Fiona Wright says:
This essay is bold and smart and genuinely exciting: it has a riskiness of form, but also of style and of ideas. It manages to balance its meticulous research and deep thinking with a wild energy and playfulness, and does this so lightly that its careful combinations feel almost effortless. It is an offering of hope, and it is a call to arms, and both of those are thrilling.
I love this essay, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And that’s because it is, above all else, an essay of ideas (and essays are such wonderful vehicles for ideas). It is an essay of ideas before it is an essay of identity or representation or experience—and I want to emphasise this point because I am very aware of the very obvious skin I have in its game. But I selected this piece because it is brilliant. It is beautifully written and utterly compelling, and something entirely, and wonderfully, fresh and strange and new.
We’re also delighted to announce two runner-up essays:
‘The Mother Cake’ by Georgia Mill
A reflection on the overlooked role of the placenta in pregnancy and birth, which invites readers to question where their body starts and ends, and how to come to terms with our body not being our own.
Georgia Mill is a queer writer and artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). She wrote and produced the podcast A Fluorescent Feeling and has been shortlisted for the Scribe Non-Fiction Prize.
‘Road Ecology’ by Connor Tomas O’Brien
The land beneath Australia’s grid of roads and highways once served as floodplain, wetland, scrub and forest. ‘Road Ecology’ traces two paths: a trail away from roads, winding up the northern half of Wilsons Promontory, and the story of how we have learned to understand roads as ecological ‘non-places’.
Connor Tomas O’Brien is a writer and graphic designer based in Naarm. He writes ‘Change is Hard’, a newsletter for lapsed and lazy environmentalists.
Fiona Wright says:
Both of the runner-up essays are skilful explorations of our individual and very physical relationships with the broader social structures that contain us. Connor O’Brien’s ‘Road Ecology’ works as a kind of mapping, considering how we see and live in ordinary spaces—with a very fitting nod to the Situationists and their interest in what we can learn by walking, or from overlooked terrain. It’s impressive for its curiosity—it draws on a remarkable range of perspectives and fields on knowledge, with every one of them adding something new to its argument and ideas.
Georgia Mill’s ‘The Mother Cake’ draws its social and worldly considerations together with very delicately handled, deeply personal material—and this is fitting for a piece that is about interrelatedness and interconnectedness, the entanglements of our bodies. It’s nonetheless an essay that doesn’t shy away from the abject and taboo—and the author’s own implication in these—without using them gratuitously, and that shows great skill in thinking through the lived realities abstracted in science, medicine and law.
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Caitlin receives $3,000 in prize money, donated by Kill Your Darlings; Connor and Georgia both receive $1,000. All three winning essays will be published in KYD in early 2023.
Designed to celebrate and showcase outstanding and illuminating non-fiction writing, the inaugural prize attracted 245 entries from around Australia, across a broad range of topics and styles. Catch up on our 10 brilliant shortlisted entries, and thanks to everyone who entered!
