Anna Sanderson has won the 2006 Landfall Essay Competition, as judged by Simon During, who is ‘one of Australasia's foremost living literary intellectuals’. (Would have been a bummer to have got one of the dead ones). During said Anna’s essay connected 'knowledge to imagination', as I'm sure all the best ones should. Patrick Evans was runner up – he has already been a joint winner of the prize with Kapka Kassabova in 2002. Other former winners have been Gregory O'Brien (1997), C.K. Stead and Peter Wells (1999), and Tze Ming Mok and Martin Edmond (2004).

Reading this press release – maybe it was the weekend of Xmas parties – I suddenly realised I would have been hard put to define an essay. So sue me. An online dictionary (which shall remain nameless lest I become some kind of literary and social pariah) put me right (I think).

An essay is ‘a short literary composition on a particular theme or subject, usually in prose and generally analytic, speculative, or interpretive’. Well, Anna’s one, Dr Yang, has apparently been dubbed ‘half short-story, half essay-memoir’ and in it, a woman visits a Chinese acupuncturist in suburbia seeking treatment for a blocked milk duct. ‘The experience is unsettling, banal and exotic all at once.’ Like finding a wonton in your fish and chips perhaps? Why a blocked milk duct particularly? There are plenty of things you could have acupunture for in the suburbs, after all. I’m agog.

Anyway, the winning and runner-up essays will feature in Landfall 212. Richard Reeve is the guest editor of this issue and it’s all about the "corporate recolonisation of ostensible 'hinterlands', both in New Zealand and globally".

The PR says: ‘Iconic printmaker and veteran environmental activist Marilynn Webb speaks her mind about the inertia of much contemporary art in responding to the devastation of the land, Paul Schimmel searches for greatness in a rotting backwater town, Cilla McQueen elegises the shrunken innocence of the Deep South under the cuff of business, Anton Oliver observes a global plague of greed, and Robert Sullivan asks the PM frank questions about her duty to Maori. This is the Aotearoa of the corporate wind farm, the megabucks hydroelectic scheme against the mountain and the haka, a land where cultural jingoism treads on sacred purity.’ [Jaysus - Chris.]

Now here’s a blurb about the poor judge so you can all be well-informed before you stick the knife in: 'Simon During has published extensively on postcolonialism, Australian, New Zealand and world literature, eighteenth-century literature and culture, modernism, cultural studies and globalism. During is regarded as a world expert on the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, though recent research topics, which include the work of Henry James and the Harlequinade tradition in eighteenth-century literature, show the diversity of his interests. His most recent book is Cultural Studies: a Critical Tradition (Routledge, 2005).'

As for Richard Reeve: well, he’s featured on LeafSalon before, hailing from the Bluff ’06 (ouch). At the moment he's getting other buffetings from his opposition to two whopping wind-farms in Otago. He is the founding editor of Glottis: New Writing, the author of two books of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (AUP 2001) and The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), and his third and fourth books, In Continents and a long poem called Effluvium, are in the pipeline. He can probably claim to be the only person to have had his first book appear in the Listener's Worst Books of the Year (2001), and his second in the the same publication's Best (2004).

So, anyone out there read Brainpark? I skimmed it very quickly and had an impression of a series of brief but quite lovely impressions. We have had emails here at LeafSalon which both love and hate the cover, a blurry, twilit, rather spooky picture of Huka Falls which I personally like very much but someone else said drove them insane because it’s just really bad photography. Someone else who shall remain nameless said the book was ‘long on style but short on content and reeks at times of creative writing exercise’.

I think some experimental writing is becoming more like visual art in that it seems to try and distill a significant event into something which is more of a sense or a feeling. Meaning that you have to take from it what you want, based on your own experiences – and no reader is going to have the same response. Just like a painting. Airini Beautrais does it quite deliciously at times in her new book Secret Heart. Anyway, Brainpark is certainly controversial, which is good, so we’ll be keen to read Dr Yang.

Another review coming up this week. Cowboy Dog. And Chris is going to do at least one as well, hopefully before he’s hospitalised for party fatigue. We’re here to help you with your Xmas shopping after all. Y'all come back now.