A huge thank you to everyone who entered the 2022 Reflex novella award. We received 148 entries from 19 different countries. Again we were astonished by the quality and range of entries we received. There was a good mix of novellas-in-flash, conventional novellas, and a few that fell somewhere in between. Now, to the winners:
Winner
Quotidian by Mary Wilkinson
Quotidian is a novella of vignettes and essays portraying a woman as she tries to make sense of her mid-life existence. The pieces, individually titled and stand-alone, connect to form an intimate and reflective narrative.
The scenarios presented could be snapshots in a photograph album. Some blurry and some startlingly clear, they range from the monotony of household chores to the pleasure of standing by a window to admire the view and to the ordinariness of a bowl of cooking apples on the kitchen table. There are moments of unspoken despair juxtaposed with ponderings on sexuality, relationships, hate, loneliness, loss, beauty, solitude and ultimately love.
The unnamed protagonist refers to the rooms spanning her childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and marriage in an attempt to explain her malcontent and disillusionment associated with her role as wife, mother and full-time homemaker.
The predictability of her days is completely upended when Herbert Grouse, a homeless man, who plays the saxophone, comes to live in her home because of a compulsory government programme requiring citizens to rent out rooms. This unconventional relationship leads the protagonist to a gradual and necessary unravelling and acceptance of her reality.
Her constant companion, confidante and imp is Miss C., an invisible friend since childhood, she is privy to the innermost fears, desires and flaws of the principal character.
In an attempt to find her voice and reclaim her identity, the woman examines her life and faces up to her perceived invisibility by ultimately finding resolution through the simple act of picking up a pen and beginning to write.
Wilkinson shines a light on the mundanity of the homemaker narrator.
We loved the use of recurring devices in this novella: the metaphor of rooms to explore the changing life of the narrator; the ever-present Miss C., seemingly acting as shoulder angel/devil according to the narrator’s situation. Quite fittingly, there is a sense of claustrophobia as the rooms of the narrator’s life fill – both figuratively and literally when a homeless musician takes up residence in her home – and the cracks begin to show. With brilliantly astute writing, Wilkinson shines a light on the mundanity of the homemaker narrator and keeps the reader on their toes with the occasional piece that plays with structure or repetition, creating a varied reading experience.
About the author
Mary Wilkinson is published in Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, The Irish Times, Books Ireland, West 47, The Dublin Quarterly International Lit. Review, Tell Tale Souls (San Francisco), Listowel Writers’ Week Winners Anthologies, Lyric FM’s Quiet Quarter and RTE’s A Living Word Anthologies, The Galway Review and The Waxed Lemon. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020. She lives in the West of Ireland with her husband and Parson Russell Terrier, Eddie.
Runner Up
For Always Only by Emily Bullock
Strange, how getting lost in a book can help you find a way back to yourself.
Issy is stuck in a bedsit in Bloomsbury trying to read Finnegans Wake. As life unravels around her, the need to read begins to consume her.
Each turning of the page reveals more about the lies that hold her life together – her unhappy love affair, the loss of her job, her absent mother, Sunshine, and her ill father. The past creeps out between the lines.
She’s been trying to read the book since she was ten years old, since the night Sunshine left. Now, isolated in her room, disturbed only by a nosy neighbour and an angry blind cat, she gives herself seventeen days to finish the seventeen chapters.
To see if Joyce has been right all along. To decide if the end of the book will really be the end of everything.
The novella zips along to an ending that is both surprising and inevitable.
Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, with tantalising flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood, this novella puts a new spin on the lockdown experience. We loved how the narrator’s aim to read the impenetrable Finnegans Wake mirrors her own complicated, messy life. The narrator’s unlikely companions – a stubborn old woman and a blind cat – allow for moments of comedy and sadness. Of our three winners, this is the only conventional novella, but there is still room for a playful touch here and there: peppered throughout are facts and anecdotes about Finnegans Wake and James Joyce, and at times the structure of the novella pays homage to Finnegans Wake. Written in Bullock’s wonderful prose, the novella zips along to an ending that is both surprising and inevitable.
About the author
Emily Bullock won the Bristol Short Story Prize with her story ‘My Girl’, which was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her short stories have been included in different anthologies including A Short Affair (Scribner, 2018). She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and completed her PhD at the Open University, where she teaches creative writing. Her debut novel, The Longest Fight, was shortlisted for the Cross Sports Book Awards, and listed in The Independent’s Paperbacks of the Year 2015. Her second novel Inside the Beautiful Inside was published in 2020, and her collection of short stories, Human Terrain, was published in 2021.
Runner Up
Real Toads, Imagined Garden by Frank Dax
As Joyce once said of Dublin, the same can be said of Seoul: ‘It seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.’ In remedy arrives this work’s narrator, a flaneur living as a foreigner in Seoul, Korea. As he navigates the strains of an international marriage and an imminent foray into fatherhood, the observations and peregrinations of this urban Thoreau are recorded in a series of linked vignettes, seasonally arranged and varying in content from ethnographic insight, to metaphysical musing, to pastoral rhapsody.
Accompany him to the marketplace, the public bath, the passenger car of a bullet train. Encounter the characters that people these places: the teachers, tailors and billiard players, the elders, lovers and loners. No class nor corner of the city is ignored in the protagonist’s search to understand both self and society. And though the work is set in the environs of Seoul, its plein air portrayal of a culture in transition, along with its artful unlocking of the mystery in the mundane and the beauty in the banal, gives local colours universal appeal.
A panorama both critical and poetic, Real Toads, Imagined Garden courts the genres of the travelogue, the lyrical essay, and even haibun to give elegant expression to the evolution of a life and of a land.
It’s also a love letter to Seoul.
This novella swept us along with its beautiful prose. On the face of it, this is a very simple novella: we follow the narrator for a year as he goes about his normal life – going to work, visiting his wife’s family or an old friend, hiking in the mountains outside the city – but at the same time we gain insight into how these everyday events have a significant impact on the narrator, his family, his neighbours and the people who work in the shops and restaurants of his neighbourhood, and even the wider city. This novella perfectly encapsulates the idea that no person is an island, that we’re all part of something bigger, even the novella’s rather solitary narrator. It’s also a love letter to Seoul. The author’s fondness for his adoptive home is apparent throughout, and the city and its environs are as much the main characters of this novella as the narrator himself.
About the author
Of Pennsylvanian birth, Frank Dax resides in South Korea. Look for him among the crowds and creek beds, or befriending the bees of his rooftop garden. Publications appear in outlets as diverse as Litro, Modern Haiku, Korea Journal, and Gastronomica.
Congratulations, Mary, Emily, and Frank!