Brisbane poet takes out inaugural Jewish youth literary prize

Award-winning writer and artist Anna Jacobson has received the inaugural Young Jewish Writers Award for her highly-anticipated second illustrated poetry collection, Anxious in a Sweet Store.

The $5,000 award is part of the new Australian Jewish Book Awards created by not-for-profit Shalom to recognise excellence in contemporary Jewish Australian writing.

Michael Gawenda won the $10,000 Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction, for his book My Life as a Jew.

Both authors were honoured at a ceremony on the closing night of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival last Sunday.

"Winning this award means so much to me. The encouragement has given me more confidence and purpose to continue writing about my experiences as a Jewish Australian," Jacobson said.

"Special thanks to my beautiful family and friends, my wonderful publisher Terri-ann at Upswell, and my brilliant mentor and editor Felicity Plunkett. I am so grateful for the Australian Jewish Book Awards and the opportunities, recognition, and support this gives Jewish Australian authors to further connect with the community and be acknowledged."

Anxious in a Sweet Store is a whimsical, inventive and intimate account of trauma, mental illness and the health care system. As if in a candy store, readers are invited to pick-and-choose their experience – whether that is reading from start to finish or dipping in and out of the collection – to devour themes of food, anxiety, relationships and culture.

Jacobson was selected by a panel of three judges – critic Tali Lavi, writer Jonathan Seidler and TJI’s events manager Sharon Berger – who chose from a shortlist that also included Mood by Roz Bellamy, We Need to Talk About Ageing by Melissa Levi, and So That Happened…But Maybe You Already Knew That by Tami Sussman.

The award was open to works of fiction and non-fiction on Jewish subjects by authors aged 18 to 40.

"The shortlisted authors inspire me and highlight the importance of diverse representations of Jewish Australian experiences and the works we create. I encourage everyone to read their books," Jacobson added.

The judging panel called Anxious in a Sweet Store "a stunning collection of vital and inventive
poetry that deftly moves between themes of mental health and recovery, and the singular
feeling of growing up Jewish in modern Australia," adding that the work "sizzles with inventiveness, both in form and content".

The win adds to Jacobson’s literary successes. Her first full-length poetry collection, Amnesia Findings, won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In 2020, she won the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing, was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship, and shortlisted in the Spark Prize.

As an artist, Jacobson has exhibited throughout Australia, and has been a finalist in the Brisbane Portrait Prize, Blake Art Prize and Marie Ellis Prize for Drawing.

Below is Jacobson's poem, How to Reawaken a Room, an excerpt from Anxious in a Sweet Store:

How to Reawaken a Room

It’s a sensory thing. Some rooms soar me light, twirl me west. As though each morning, walls have shifted towards sun, like plants. I drink up rooms’ energy. Some rooms are steeped in memory, ritual, learning. You feel it in the air, smell it in the chalk dust and old books. And you are about to enter a חדר.

חדר is Hebrew for Cheder: English translation = room. A learning space for Jewish children. How to reawaken a room? Go back seven years after your Bat Mitzvah. Pegs grip twine. Remember finger-painting the Hebrew letter א. Choosing the windowsill for drying. Watching your work blow out the window – journeying its way down Brisbane city streets.

Visit when no חדר classes are running. Photograph the furniture and chairs covered in carvings and graffiti by Sunday school children across generations: names and dates, Magen Davids and hearts. The smell of old books, drawings and messages that say rooms can be reawakened. Ingredients: an anxious photographer let in by the caretaker with a long memory.

I do not have a long memory. My memory is fragmented; each shard has a single long edge, like a scalene triangle, no sides equal in length. I traverse these longer edges. I walk along them as far as they will let me, always leading me back to the same point and images until I have to make new triangles. My brain looks like an Escher map. Of kitchen tiles. The kitchen is where most memories occur. The touch of a ripe plum from a fruit bowl; cool orange juice on hot days; making heirloom recipes with the matriarch; passing down matzah ball recipes, like a fistful of keys. Kneading keys into challah.