UC academic wins prestigious essay prize
12 January 2012
By Martin Moore, College of Arts intern
University of Canterbury English lecturer Philip Armstrong has won the prestigious Landfall essay prize for his essay on life following the Christchurch earthquakes, On Tenuous Ground.
Landfall, New Zealand’s longest-running literary journal, created the essay competition in 1997 to celebrate its 50th birthday. Its goal is to encourage New Zealand writers to “think aloud about New Zealand culture, and to revive and sustain the tradition of vivid, contentious and creative essay writing”.
To claim the $3000 prize, Dr Armstrong (Humanities) went up against 28 others from around New Zealand, whose essays covered topics ranging from what it means to be Christian in a secular age to an essay about a pair of Maori flutes held in a museum in Massachusetts, in the United States.
Dr Armstrong said his inspiration for the 6000-word essay came while walking his dog by the local cemetery when he noticed that over successive earthquakes and aftershocks he saw more and more headstones turn, break and fall.
“I walk my dogs there every day. When you do something like that every day you sort of stop noticing where you are, but I kept noticing because things would be different. A cemetery’s not something you’d expect to change very much, but all these huge headstones would all be different.”
The essay starts by narrating Dr Armstrong’s personal experience of the quakes and aftershocks, but broadens into an exploration of how earthquakes are depicted in myth and religious texts. Landfall editor David Eggleton said Dr Armstrong’s essay was so effective because “everything incorporated was not only relevant but correctly contextualised, serving both to embellish and advance the narrative in a manner at once erudite and entertaining”.
The essay was also a method of coping and making sense of the experience, said Dr Armstrong, something that many people around Christchurch had been doing over the course of the year.
“Living in a place where even the cemetery was liable to change day by day, it’s just quite an unusual experience. All of us, or many of us, feel that it kind of helps to record things like that so I’m pleased that this is a kind of record of my little corner of that.”
For more information please contact:
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