Raglan author, Andre Ngapo has received a Highly Commended award in the BNZ Literary Awards for his entry, Small Galaxy. Judge Albert Wendt said that Andre’s story was “an unpretenious, complex, lyrical story about love, longing and regret … the story shines and wins our affection, making us relive/re-experience the loves that we once had and lost.”
In 2009 Andre won the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and was a speaker on First Steps in Writing for Children at the Word Cafe held in Raglan earlier this year. He is a teacher at Raglan Area School and a musician.
In 2012 there were 550 short stories entered for this competition. In 2013 there were 750 entries – a large increase and proof that the short story is still very alive in our country. It is a huge ‘task’ judging this number of stories. Anna Hodge, the Senior Editor of Auckland University Press, did the initial selection, reading all the entries and selecting 51 stories including Andre’s, Small Galaxy. Judge Albert Wendt then read the 51 stories many times, sorting them into ‘an order of preference’. He deliberately took many days to do this, stopping every time he felt the stories were ‘reading the same’. He said that the final step was to re-read them the next day, each time discovering – or not discovering – more depths, complexities, balance, and nuances to the stories.