Local author Pauline Cleary won the Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize at this year’s Willy Lit Fest
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Local writer Pauline Cleary has been awarded the prestigious Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize at this year’s Willy Lit Fest, the Williamstown Literary Festival, held over the weekend of June 20 to 22.
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“I have been writing for a long time, it has always been something I love to do,” Ms Cleary said.
“I mainly write short stories and poetry.
“I enter competitions and have some published in anthologies.”
While Ms Cleary hasn’t published any books, her work has appeared in various anthologies and literary journals.
Her winning entry was an autobiographical piece about a childhood memory.
“It was the story of going for a walk with my sister when I was a child,” she said.
“Going mushrooming and climbing to the top of a hill and seeing everything below me and really, that sense of wonder that you get, a sense of awe seeing all the world laid out before you.”
Willy Lit Fest, established in 2003, named its prestigious prize after Ada Cambridge, an English-born Australian writer who lived in Williamstown from 1893 to 1909.
Cambridge was one of Australia’s finest colonial writers, producing more than 25 works of fiction, three volumes of poetry and two autobiographical works during her lifetime.
Pauline Cleary received the award form Alice White, the great-great niece of Ada Cambridge, with Victorian MP Melissa Horne in the background.
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Ms Cleary has been an active member of the Campaspe Murray Writers’ Group, which recently celebrated its silver anniversary, for 25 years.
“There are a lot of writing opportunities advertised online, available to lots of people,” she said.
“I go to the local writers’ group, there are lots of talented writers, story writers, poets, memoir writers and they write in their favourite genre and share their writing.
“Some people self-publish, some people do family history, some people actually publish plays.”
Welcoming attendees regardless of their writing genre or experience, the Campaspe Murray Writers’ Group meets at the Echuca library on the last Tuesday of the month at 3pm.
