Kristina Ross wins final Vogel prize

It’s our favourite time of the year, here at the Books pages. Why? It is Vogel Prize time, meaning we get to stand back, while a talented new writer is launched into the world.

Author Kristina Ross, winner of the 2024 Vogel Prize, on the beach near her home on the Gold Coast. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen / The Australian

It’s our favourite time of the year, here at the Books pages.

Why?

It is Vogel Prize time, meaning we get to stand back, while a talented new writer is launched into the world.

This year’s winner is Kristina Ross, 35, of the Gold Coast. Her manuscript, First Year, takes seriously the ambitions of young actors, as they work on their craft during an intense first year at acting school.

All three judges were deeply impressed.

First Year by Kristina Ross is the last winner of the Vogel award

She knows her stuff, we said to each other. And now, having interviewed her this week, I know why: as well as being a writer, Kristina is an accomplished actor in her own right. She lived “the first year” in a company of talented peers. She takes theatre seriously and she’s ambitious for Australians working in film, theatre, and literature.

It was a pleasure to give the Vogel to her.

The prize includes publication by Allen & Unwin, meaning the book is out today. Kristina got her copy a few weeks back, and “burst into tears. It has been on the horizon for so long – a dream of mine, to have my novel published, and now it’s happened.”

Kristina, 35, was born and raised on the Gold Coast, but moved at age seventeen to Melbourne to take up an offer at the Victoria College of the Arts. She was one of the youngest actors ever selected, and still only 20 when she graduated.

“I had literally just finished high school,” she said. “I’d had an amazing drama teacher at All Saints Anglican School (in Queensland) who encouraged me to audition, and I was accepted, and it was an amazing opportunity but I was incredibly young at 17, living on my own, commuting, going out, it was unbelievable. And Melbourne was a very different city back then. It’s so big now! But I just loved it.

Kristina Ross wrote parts of her prize-winning book while pregnant with her second child. Picture: Nigel Hallett

“I stayed in acting for quite a while after I graduated - Kristina has worked with Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, the Melbourne Theatre Company, and both acted and produced for the Artisan Collective – but over time, I started writing a series with a friend of mine, and found that I was falling more in love with that aspect - storytelling more so than acting – and feeling more excited to be on the other side, rather than being in a production myself.”

Her partner, now husband, Tim Ross, who is also an actor, landed an important role in Sydney, and she moved with him to the Emerald City, where they stayed until it was time to have children, after which they moved back to the Gold Coast, so the kids could have the kind of roaming, barefoot childhood Kristina had enjoyed.

“The idea for First Year came to me when I was pregnant with my first son, Sullivan,” she says. “I began writing when I was pregnant with my second son, Bo. There’s only 18 months between them. So I would work every day at my kitchen table, usually between the hours of 12 and two, which was a nap time for my boys.

“I would work every day - literally every single day. It just felt really right to me, stepping away from acting and stepping into what I imagined would be my writing life, and with the kids, it was a beautiful chaos, raising them, and having something that was just for me, myself. And I really believed in the story.

“So I just kept writing and once I had a draft that I was happy with, I tried to find a home for it and truthfully that was really hard. That was eye-opening to me. You know, I’ve always thought okay, you do the work, and then you find a home for it, but you have to be resilient.

“The Vogel prize was honestly the last opportunity for me before, I don’t know, the manuscript might have gone into the bottom drawer. So winning this has been life changing for me and honestly, it’s what I’ve been striving towards. I can’t even put into words what that felt like to win. I feel like I’ve been crying on and off for nine months, because I’ve been visualising this for so long.”

I was lucky enough to be a judge for the 2024 prize, and I enjoyed Kristina’s entry enormously. I thought she captured the high drama, as it were, of a first year acting class as a prestigious acting school, extremely well. She’s explored so many of the possibilities – the older actor, for example, who has everyone in thrall - and it was fascinating to read about the muscular nature of some of the acting classes, where students were left bruised. The scenes involving intense competition between youngsters, who are so hungry and so vulnerable, were tense, and ripe. I liked the way the reader was able to observe the characters as they went about their lives, and it was nice to be reminded what it’s like to be young and trying to strike out on your own in an exciting city.

Kristina says she had a first draft complete “by the time Bo turned one, in September 2021. I continued working on the manuscript for another year and a

half, integrating feedback from a handful of close friends. I submitted it to various agents and publishers during that time. And it took many, many months to hear back from people. Some never responded at all. The Vogel was the very last opportunity for me. I remember calling my Mum and saying, do you think I should enter? Because I was also just about to turn 35 (the cut-off for entries) and she encouraged me.”

She was over the moon when her entry won, and hopes that it will find readers, but also, potentially, actors!

“From the first moment I started writing First Year, I thought: I can see this as a series. And I would love for that to happen. I would love to see it explored in another medium. I think it would lend itself really well to that.

“But I’m also excited for readers to have a book that takes the craft of acting seriously. Often, actors will find the process is either inflated, or made a mockery of, and I wanted to rectify that.

“I searched for a story like this when I was a young actor in training and just never found it. You know, a story that was set in an Australian city that had actors in a school on the same par as London or New York, because some of the best work I’ve ever seen, truthfully, has been the work of actors in training at VCA. I still think of some of the plays I saw there.”

First Year is proudly published by Allen & Unwin, and it’s a bittersweet moment for the publisher, because it will be the last winner of the Vogel. After 44 years, the prize will get a new sponsor next year, with HarperCollins taking over management of The Australian’s new prize for fiction. We will have more details soon. I know that many of you are keen to enter, and I can’t wait to read your work.

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Today’s mailbag: Allan Jamieson writes to say: I am president and secretary of the Fellowship of Australian Writers North-West (which is a branch of FAW Tasmania, which is based in Hobart.)

“Our branch has existed for more than 60 years; at present we have 21 members (close to 50/50 female/male) who live along the coast from Sisters Beach to East Devonport – a distance of 90 kilometres. We are closer to Melbourne than to Hobart in distance and in travel time.

“Thirteen of our members have already published books. Though most of us have tried to find agents or publishers, only one member can be said to have “made it” to the exalted level of being a paid writer – with a hardly adequate wage!

“For the rest, it seems self-publishing is to be our fate. However, we get a very warm feeling whenever a story of ours is to hand in the form of a book – just like holding a baby!”

But you know, as somebody once said to me: the fact that your book can’t find a publisher doesn’t mean it’s no good.

It means they don’t want to publish it, for a million different reasons, and they often say no with deep regret.

There’s nothing to stop you from having a go.

FAWNW itself has published several anthologies, most recently in 2019, 2021 and 2023. The blurb for the 2021 edition reads: “We are a diverse bunch of people with lots of varying life experiences, but the one thing we agree upon is that writing is important to us: important to expressing our thoughts, to perhaps even understanding ourselves, through the creative act of putting thoughts and ideas into words others can access.

The process is challenging, but ... as a community group we grow together – support each other, challenge ourselves to improve our skills. This anthology reflects that journey together.”

Lovely! You can find the anthologies and the group online.

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Today’s pages: all being well, I’m in Scotland as you read this, drinking whiskey. Please enjoy the Books pages in my absence. I’ve put some lovely things in for your reading pleasure, among them a review of Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead, and a review by Geordie Williamson on a new book about the glamorous Paget twins. My plan is to be back next week, with a story or two up my kilt. In the meantime, enjoy.