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Lucy wins Sir Julius Vogel award for best Short Story

Lucy won a Sir Julius Vogel award for her Short Story "Mist and Murder" published in New Ceres 2 (www.newceres.com).

Sir Julius Vogel was not only premier of New Zealand in the C19th, but wrote a feminist imperialist utopia in 1887. It's called ANNO DOMINI 2000; OR WOMEN'S DESTINY.

The main character is a female MP from Dunedin, NZ, who ends up marrying the British emperor and changing the male precedence rule re the British monarchy's succession. And the President of America is a 35 year old woman (Mrs Washington-Lawrence), with a teenage daughter but no visible husband.

You will see that Sir Julius was a cool person.

The odd thing about the win is that the story, from Alisa Krasnostein's New Ceres website, was based on Mary Fortune's 1866 story 'Mystery and Murder'. Fortune wrote the longest-running early crime serial, the Detective's Album, for 40 years. Her husband, Percy Brett, was a Police mounted trooper. In the 1850s, before they met and married, he was stationed in Maryborough, Victoria, and on a slow news day in town, was the subject of an editorial in the MARYBOROUGH ADVERTISER, for allegedly exceeding his police duties. The writer was the paper's editor, the young Julius Vogel, later to emigrate to New Zealand.

Which is a curious coincidence.

 
Last Updated on Thursday, 05 February 2009 06:04
 
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