By Len Power

Omar Musa, visual artist, rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, has won first and second prize in the 2024 Newcastle Short Story Award for his two stories, Langsat and Boogeyman.

Melbourne-based author Lisa Lang took third prize in the annual competition, which received 500 entries from which 34 were shortlisted.

The Hunter Writers’ Centre award, announced on Sunday as part of the Newcastle Writers’ Festival, offers a first prize of $3000, second prize of $1500, and third prize of $500, as well as a highly commended entry prize of $200 and the Hunter Writers’ Centre members’ prize of $500.

“I’m over the moon to have won two prizes in the Newcastle Short Story Award, and that my writing has resonated with the judges,” Musa said.

“Langsat is fiction but is based on a scary experience that happened to me after my first (and last) kickboxing fight in Kota Kinabalu. It got me thinking deeply about issues like statelessness in Sabah, entrenched inequality and injustice, migration, violence, chance and at times insurmountable gaps in understanding. I wanted the reader to experience a form of vertigo, just like the characters do.”

Boogeyman, his story that won second prize, is about a book theft that leads to an unlikely friendship.

Musa’s new novel, Fierceland, will be released by Penguin in September.

Lang, who won third prize for her story, Body Memory, is the award-winning author of the novel Utopian Man.