Local high school students had the opportunity to hear from and work with an award-winning local author this week.
Geelong author Kgshak Akec visited Matthew Flinders Girls Secondary College (MFG) on Monday, March 18 to run a workshop for Year 12 VCE English students on the theme of writing about personal journeys.
For her debut novel Hopeless Kingdom, which won the 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ms Akec drew on her experiences as a six-year-old migrant refugee coming to Australia from Sudan via Egypt.
In the workshop she discussed writing about her personal journey before providing students with prompts to draw on their own memory and experiences to produce a short work.
Ms Akec, 26, said she was “very impressed” with the students’ creativity and “strong sense of self”.
“I delved deep into my own personal journey to draw that out of them, and I saw how quickly that they felt connected to me… asking questions and telling me what they got out of the lesson, sharing a little bit about themselves and their own personal journeys and the memories that they have,” she said.
“It was a really nice way to form a connection with the students but also create a space of shared storytelling because I was learning as much from them as they were from me.”
MFG student Sienna Donatucci said Ms Akec presented some really interesting ideas she had never considered before.
“(Ms Akec) was absolutely lovely, and the way she spoke she seemed so informed, very grounded, she knew what she was talking about,” she said.
“It was all very real, you could tell her story is very dear to her. It was really great to hear her story directly from her.”
