Tasmin Prichard
Tasmin Prichard has won this year’s Landfall Tauraka Essay Prize for their essay, ‘Four Hours in the Dark, Forgetting’, a quiet and intimate retelling of their experience undergoing gender-affirming top surgery.
‘I’d always meant to write about surgery, but the idea took a while to percolate and it took nearly three years until I was ready,’ Tasmin says. ‘The surgery experience was intense and out-of-body, but neatly segmented by time. The process of writing was like pulling those memories off a shelf and examining them one by one. It felt like a long meditation on care and love and transformation.’
‘I wanted to write about gender-affirming care with as little capital-p politics as possible. Trans bodies are the site of constant discourse and political violence. Gender-affirming healthcare has been reduced to talking points and weaponised in the modern culture wars and the backlash against increasing trans visibility has been vicious.’
‘Constantly, trans people are given the message their bodies and lives are factoids, things to be wielded. This is damaging by itself. We just want to be able to pay rent, hang with our mates, not be hatecrimed, and have enough money to buy DJ equipment. It’s bananas to me that everyone and their dog feels entitled to an opinion about trans people. The trans body is no more inherently political than anyone else’s.’
‘If reading this work offers a somewhat demystified understanding of how dysphoria can actually play out—grounding a fairly everyday, commonexperience for trans people—I’d be stoked.’
Judge Tina Makereti praised the winning essay as ‘taut, succinct, eloquent and poignant’, noting that it embodied the three qualities she looks for when judging: skill, a strong kaupapa and emotional resonance.
‘It stayed with me through many weeks and successive readings,’ Makereti said. ‘Sometimes I think essay is about making arguments, but this one taught me an essay can be a thing that cuts through all argument. Instead, it simply says, Here is something I have lived through. Here is something you can’t know except by living it, but perhaps if I can distil it down to this pure form you can know something about it too.’
‘The experience of body dysmorphia; the graciousness and forgiveness around the body; the care and love towards tissue being removed: these offerings surprised and lifted. This essay needs to be read whole, and then read again. I found it incredibly moving, and I felt somehow held by it, too; there is a generosity here, a simplicity. Here is just a person, trying to exist.’
Second place has been awarded to ‘Crossing’ by Rachel Buchanan. Third equal goes to ‘Ina’s Shark and Other Stories’ by Stacey Kokaua-Balfour and ‘Kihikihi Wawā: Cycles of transformation and renewal’ by Ariana Tikao. Highly commended are ‘Substitutions for Home’ by Olivia Pham and ‘Strange Ruptures’ by Katie Lane.
Read Tasmin’s essay ‘Four Hours in the Dark, Forgetting’ in Landfall Tauraka 250: Spring 2025.