Welcome to the 2024 Nine to Noon Short Story Competition, judged by author Harry Ricketts and Tina Makareti.
Entries open August 30 and close on September 27, 2024.
The top five winners will be announced on Friday 25 October, and those stories will be purchased by RNZ and recorded and broadcast on Nine to Noon in November.
Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan says she’s excited about the competition happening again. “We love seeing what our clever listeners do with the written word, it's a real highlight for me and the team."
"A great short story gives us a glimpse into a life so immediate that we feel we know both that person and their world," says Harry Ricketts.
He says there was a huge range of entries to last year's competition but the ones that stood out were those that had "a lot of heart and a lot of skill".
Terms & conditions:
The competition is open to anyone 16 years and older, and has a 2,000 word limit.
No stories which have previously been published can be entered.
Only one entry per writer.
Stories will be anonymised for judging.
Not open to RNZ employees.
By entering this competition, you agree that RNZ can make a recording of the story to use on radio and online, as well as publishing the story on the RNZ website. RNZ will purchase the rights to the five winning stories.
Competition Judges
Harry Ricketts has recently retired from the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where he continues to teach a course in creative writing. He has taught some of Aotearoa's most brilliant authors, essayists and poets. Harry is a biographer, essayist and poet himself, and has published around thirty books. They include poetry, fiction, non-fiction and literary biography - among them the internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War. Harry's latest is Selected Poems, published in June 2021.
Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore) is author of The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and co-editor of Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology of short stories that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. In 2016 her story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, Pacific region. Her other books are Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (2014) and Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (2010). In 2022, while she was an Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence, she won the Landfall Essay Competition. She convenes one of the MA creative writing workshops at the IIML, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
