To be eligible for the Ampersand Prize, writers should not have already published a novel for these audiences with a trade publisher anywhere in the world. The winner receives an advance and contract for publication, as well as extensive development and collaboration with the Hardie Grant Egmont editorial team.

You’d have to be living under a rock to not know who Erin Gough is. The second Ampersand Prize winner has been everywhere lately, appearing at the Sydney Writers Festival and Reading Matters conference in May (alongside YA heavyweights Melina Marchetta, Laurie Halse Anderson and Sean Williams, no less) and wowing audiences with her insight into story design and writing about queer characters.

Here she talks to us about winning the Ampersand Prize and publishing her debut novel The Flywheel.

Erin, who was the first person you told after learning you’d won the Ampersand Prize?



I told three people at once: my partner, Emma, my friend Rani and the man whose shop we were in when Hardie Grant called. He was horrified at first, but seemed to warm to the news after I stopped jumping up and down between his breakable homewares.

Tell us a little about the process from the author’s perspective. You’ve been notified that you’ve won the Ampersand Prize, so what’s next?

After I won the prize, I embarked upon the editing process with the Hardie Grant Egmont team. The structural edit, which involved some rewriting and reshaping of parts of the draft, took about eighteen months. A copyeditor then undertook a final edit and made other close detail suggestions and comments. For example: ‘You’ve got Charlie working 14-hour days in the Flywheel café – a possible OH&S issue here?’ and ‘Why is Del driving in the passenger side of the car in this scene? We’re still in Australia, right?’ Working with skilled editors to make my story better was an extremely rewarding process and taught me a great deal about novel-writing.

What would you say to a budding YA author who’s unsure about entering their manuscript?

A lot of people worry about not being good enough to get published, but the only way to find out is to have a go at it. Don’t be afraid of rejection – it’s part of the process. I entered the Ampersand Prize in its first year and received a very kind rejection email with some helpful comments about how I could improve the manuscript. I took them on board, worked on my draft for another year, sent it off again, and was successful.

Finally, any final words of wisdom for the submission?

When you’ve finished your draft, print out the whole thing, sit down with a sharpened pencil and every time you read a part that makes you want to jab yourself in the eye with the pencil – mark it with an asterisk. Go back to all the asterisked parts and rewrite them. Print out again and repeat, until your manuscript is an asterisk-free zone. At this point, foist your manuscript on as many people as you can. Readers are not always right, but if four out of five say ‘I don’t get what happened at the end of chapter 3’, then change the end of chapter three. Do this even if a particular passage took you a year to write and could probably win the Age Short Story Competition as a standalone piece.

When you’re sure your manuscript is as good as it can be, check the spelling and proof it again for minor errors. Kiss the computer screen for luck, and press Send.

