Announcing our 2024 Best Navitas Yarn winner: Dr Bronwyne August!

After much deliberation, Dr Bronwyne August has been crowned the 2024 winner of the Best Navitas Yarn competition!

The Best Navitas Yarn is our creative writing competition that runs in parallel with The Best Australian Yarn – a national competition run by The West Australian newspaper that Navitas has proudly sponsored since 2023. Because of our involvement as a sponsor, Navitas employees and their families are ineligible to enter The Best Australian Yarn – and so, The Best Navitas Yarn was born! Open to all Navitas staff and their immediate family, The Best Navitas Yarn is an opportunity for keen writers from within our own network to showcase their creative talents and submit a short story to be in the running for a $500 AUD prize. 

Our 2024 winner, Dr Bronwyne August, is a Unit Coordinator/ Lecturer at our Edith Cowan College campus in Perth, Australia, who lectures in Communications for Diploma courses and Critical Thinking for ECC’s Post-graduate Qualifying Program. Her yarn entitled “The Bone Factory” topped the charts following assessment from our special guest judge, Alison Wakeham, from The West Australian newspaper.

Once our our three Navitas judges agreed on a top 3 shortlist they were sent to Alison who was given the difficult task of scoring each story and selecting the overall competition winner. Here’s what Alison had to say about her final decision…

“It really was difficult to choose just one winner, and it doesn’t surprise me to hear that all three Navitas judges scored the competition so closely. It was a really difficult competition to judge – three quite different stories, that each had their own strengths.

“I thought Residual Optimism (authored by Beth Collett, Marketing Manager – Europe) was a well-written story with a strong central character. The description of her life and her everyday experiences was nicely resonant. In my opinion both Beneath the Acacia (authored by Melinda Law, Academic Manager, La Trobe Sydney Campus) and The Bone Factory (the winning story), were more evocative and left a longer impression – both in very different ways.

“Beneath the Acacia was nicely creative and used some lovely language to tell the story of a very different life. The Bone Factory’s language was leaner but it suited a story set in a harsh, future world. This entry had a stronger impact on me, and it is that point that tipped it to become my top story!”  In a world already grappling with the implications of artificial intelligence, The Bone Factory made me think about what work will look like in the future but, more importantly, how we retain what it means to be human.”

You can read Bronwyne’s winning story here: The Bone Factory

You can also read the short stories from our two runners-up below!

Beneath the Acacia – authored by Melinda Law, Academic Manager, La Trobe Sydney Campus
Residual Optimism – authored by Beth Collett, Marketing Manager (Europe) 

From the author

We spoke to Bronwyne shortly after notifying her of her win – here’s what she had to say…

Hi Bronwyne – congratulations on your winning short story ‘The Bone Factory’. How does it feel to be crowned the 2024 winner of our Best Navitas Yarn competition?
Oh wow. That’s made my day. Very cool indeed!

What was your inspiration behind ‘The Bone Factory’?
As grim as it may seem, the bone factory is about mental illness. Sometimes the symptoms of anxiety might seem annoying to other people, and sometimes the illness may not be diagnosed at all. I believe that anxiety can be felt so deeply that it hurts from within the bones. To make it worse, the inundation of technology and artificial intelligence into every aspect of our lives is creating so much anxiety that those who survive it risk becoming numb to what it means to be human. Sadly, the pill that numbs us is necessary for our survival.

Have you done much creative writing before?
I’ve done a lot of creative writing, but its not something that I can sit down and say, ‘well, today I’m going to write a story’.  A story comes to me when I need to say something. The competition came up at a time when I’ve been deeply thinking on the topics of anxiety and AI.

Any thoughts on how you’ll spend the AUD$500 prize money?
No thoughts yet. Maybe I’ll go camping.

Congratulations to everyone who entered the Best Navitas Yarn. Sharing your stories with others can be a daunting experience and we hope that you have grown in confidence from the opportunity to be part of our competition.

A special thanks to Katie Banks, Piper O’Dowd and Jenny Hutchinson, who volunteered their time to read and score all of our entires in this year’s competition, and to our special guest judge Alison Wakeham.