Young author breaks down boundaries

By JULIET ROWAN

Natasha Lewis felt as if she was in Bend It Like Beckham after she wrote The Unsaid Things, a love story about a Pacific Island girl and a Pakeha girl.

The Epsom Girls Grammar School student said her mother kept asking if she was a lesbian, just like the mother in the British film about two teenage girls trying to become soccer stars.

"It was so funny," she said.

Now Mrs Lewis' curiosity has been replaced with pride because Natasha's story has won the young writers' section of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards.

The excited 17-year-old received her prize with other winners in the Bank of NZ-sponsored awards at the Prime Minister's official residence in Wellington last night.

Natasha Lewis wrote The Unsaid Things as part of her Year 13 English course.

"I wanted to show the boundaries between friendship and another kind of relationship and how those get blurred."

The story also touches on discrimination, both racial and sexual.

She had never thought of her writing as publishable. She credits two English teachers with convincing her she was wrong: Patricia Carthew of Sacred Heart Girls College in Napier and Ros Ali at Epsom Girls, who runs the school's highly successful "writing for publication" programme.

When Natasha moved to Epsom Girls last year, she found herself in a hotbed of writing, with girls displaying portfolios of published work and buzzing about writing competitions.

"It was so alive with writing it completely overwhelmed me."

The characters in her story bear little obvious resemblance to the author, who isn't a lesbian, a Pacific Islander or a Pakeha. But she does know how it feels "to fit in but not fit in".

Born in India, she moved to New Zealand when she was 8. After a year in Auckland, her family shifted to Hamilton and then Napier, where they stayed for six years.

Life there was "really, really, really Kiwi", she said.

Returning to Auckland and a more multicultural environment sparked pride in her Christian Indian heritage and a passion for Indian literature.

Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy are her favourite writers. Roy inspires with her actions as well as her words. Since Roy's first and only novel won the Booker Prize in 1997, she has concentrated on protesting at human rights violations.

Natasha hopes to follow her lead by becoming a human rights lawyer for an organisation such as Amnesty International or the United Nations.

"Writers don't have to work just as writers," she said.

She plans to start a joint law and arts degree at Auckland University next year.

Her $1500 prize will help to buy books. Another $1500 goes to her school.

The contest

Past Katherine Mansfield Award winners include Maurice Shadbolt, Frank Sargeson and Keri Hulme.

Entrants use pen names to ensure objectivity by judges, particularly in the supreme award category, which carries a $10,000 prize and attracts many well-known writers.

This year, 500 entries vied for the supreme award. The winner was Wheat by Tracey Slaughter, a tutor in Auckland University's English department.

Andrea Ewing won the novice category, open to writers who have not published work, with The Eleventh Hour. She received $1500.