CCI's Amy Barker, project manager on CCI's Remix My Lit project has won the Emerging Queensland Author - Manuscript Award in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for her novel Omega Park. The awards were announced on Tuesday 16 September at a ceremony held at the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane.
In her manuscript, Amy Vought Barker takes a social milieu under-represented in Australian fiction and presents a confronting tale of heartbreak and redemption within it. In Omega Park, a fictional housing commission estate on the geographical margins of Queensland's Gold Coast, 14-year-old Dingo Patterson and 17-year-old Jacob Box are growing up and trying to survive. Surrounded by broken families, crime and desperation, they are young men with dreams of a different life. Dingo wants to be a professional surfer and Jacob wants to prove himself to his girlfriend Johanna, who has grown up in a more privileged environment. But their lives are forever changed by a dramatic event at the outset of the novel.