WordRoom podcast – Ravenous Girls – Rebecca Burton – Australian writers on writing

There is room in the laundry for Frankie. Or there’s room for her sister Jussie. Any house in the 1980s would be too small for them both.

Ravenous Girls, by Rebecca Burton

Winner of the 20/40 Publishing Prize

Podcast Notes

South Australia, 1980s: As Frankie returns to the growing pains of her teenage life, she remembers stepping out of the shower drying off; she remembers how soon the weeks after Christmas passed. She wants to make herself a toasted cheese sandwich, as she and her sister, Justine, are fast becoming exhausted by the complexities of growing up in suburban South Australia in the mid 1980’s.

Fiction writers might feel inclined to approach a new story world in the form of micro fiction, they might choose prose poetry, or perhaps the short story. They may tease a story moment out so far that it needs breathing space – and only a full length novel will allow the story to be fully realised.

A new wave of storytellers are shaping their ideas into a form that is often overlooked. The novella is undergoing an important renaissance in Australia through the 20/40 Publishing Prize – a new prize from independent publisher Finlay Lloyd for works of between twenty thousand and forty thousand words.

In “Ravenous Girls”, Rebecca Burton’s prose is economic in its evocation of a stolen moment. The writer skilfully returns a reader of a certain age to a particular period of time in what seems like the not too distant past. For the judges of the inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, Rebecca Burton’s novella – a dual winner alongside Kim Kelly’s “Lady’s Waiting Room” – was a clear standout. In fact, both works were so good, that the judges awarded two fiction prizes, rather than one for fiction and one for nonfiction.

Burton’s recounting of the 1980s is contemplative, and it is interior. Told with a succinct and light touch, Frankie leaves no doubt of how invisible she feels. She experiences that all-too-familiar teenage angst, which here, presents as Frankie’s growing suspicion that there is something about her nature which means she will never quite fit in. Meanwhile, her sister Justine is melting away inside the challenges of a dangerous eating disorder.

While Rebecca Burton’s award winning novella has been described as YA by some reviewers, the author says the work can just as equally be read by young readers or adults. The main difference she sees between her highly successful Young Adult Fiction and this new novella, “Ravenous Girls”, is the standpoint of the storyteller.

Burton successfully establishes her narrator as an adult, looking back at her youth. And rather than explode the dynamics with hyper-realised dramatic scenes, Burton approaches the work from that more nuanced space achieved in other quiet stories, such as Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, or Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional.

At a time when the shelves of book stores are bursting with new fiction, concise and impactful storytelling in the novella form is making a comeback overseas as well. Despite a novella length work, Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” received the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and was shortlisted for both the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Booker Prize. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 work, “My Name is Lucy Barton”, was longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Though Strout’s work may be considered more of a novel than a novella, at 40,000 words, the shorter form sets the book apart from the usual length of a novel.