Pambula author Kate Liston-Mills highly commended at ACT Writers event for Dear Ibis short story collection

She was awarded on Friday, July 29 in Canberra by ACT Writers during their ACT Notable Writers Awards event in the small publishers 2021 fiction category.

Ms Liston-Mills said she was really excited to have been shortlisted and the ceremony felt special because many writing events were cancelled over the last two years due to COVID.

READ MORE: Dear Ibis: Stories to make sense of the world

Ms Liston-Mills said her short stories were all connected by a recurring theme of birds and a shared narrative.

She said she wrote the book while dealing with bushfires, raising children, and struggling with post-natal depression so it was "very raw and full of emotion".

"The book is about connection and community, the climate crisis I suppose - it has the fires in there and the drought. It was very much set in the context of when it was written.

"I was writing it just before the fires and finished it during the fires, so it's very indicative of that period of time because I was very anxious about the stats I was reading about and what I was seeing in my community and aboard," she said.

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The feelings of "connection and community" were also very prevalent in her life after she wrote the book, as shortly after the pandemic really took hold.

"We were all even more separated and I was wondering how I should navigate that space with children, communicate it all, and try to make sense of that whole fire period.

"So to have it [the book] recognised in Canberra after this long - I just wasn't expecting it at all," she said.

Ms Liston-Mills said she was "really proud" of herself when she finished writing the book as it was "quite and ambitious" feat to write the collection.

"I felt like a new person at the end, I felt like I'd really climbed up a mountain, seen the view and then the walk down the other side was much easier."

She said winning the award had made her feel connected to the writing community again and meeting with so many other great writers had really inspired her to focus on writing new content.

"I came back thinking, oh I should write another book! I felt inspired just because I was part of something bigger that's important, telling stories is important.

"Being part of that literary community in a main centre is really important for regional writers," she said.

Ms Liston-Mills said she had been writing children's books the past few months, but was sitting on a few manuscripts she said were waiting to be re-written.

Her upcoming children's stories would have a hyper-local element too, as she had been working with some Far South Coast oyster farmers from Pambula Lake to write and illustrate the stories. The plan was that the first in the series would be on shelves early next year.

"They're cute and a little bit silly, they'll be fun to read, and they're a little bit educational because a lot of people don't realise how oyster farming works and the lifecycle of an oyster," she said.

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