KATE CANTRELL: Good evening and welcome to the 2012 QUT Creative Writing Gala. Tonight we will announce the winners of the Writing Prize, and we will also launch the fourth edition of Rex, our annual anthology of student work. We make it as difficult as possible to make our writers work honestly while they are alive. We either refuse them money, or ruin them with money. We flatter them with unhelpful praise, or ruin them with bad reviews. Or when they are too old, or too dead, or too beyond dispute to annoy us any more, we canonise them, so what was wild is now tamed.

KATE ELTHAM: Invariably what people want us to talk about are things like ebooks and digital publishing and transmedia. Those things are not the future of books, those things are very much the present of books. It used to be expensive and difficult to publish books, but we all know don't we, that publishing isn't hard and every single one of us here who has a blog, has a Facebook page or a Twitter account, anyone with an internet connection or a credit card can now publish. The future of publishing isn't actually moving from print to digital media. It's about moving from scarcity to abundance. If you want to write, write. Tell stories in as many ways as you can imagine. But you should never worry about getting published. What you need to worry about is who. Who are you going to build connections with. Who are you crafting your stories for. Go out and find them, they're waiting for you.

SHARYN PEARCE: What I'm going to announce, cut straight to the chase, is the undergraduate winner. And the winner is, Emily O'Grady for Stigmatic.

EMILY O’GRADY: He decided to try and climb onto the roof, thinking that the view would be better from high up. But he lost his footing, slipped on the bricks and fell. At first it didn't hurt he said, and as he lay on the ground he felt so tired and his limbs were so heavy he felt he could fall asleep on the hard bricks with the church bells ringing in his ears. When the ringing stopped he opened his eyes and the glowing lights illuminating the church had detached themselves from their metal poles and were drifting back into the sky.

SHARYN PEARCE: Now for the postgrad prize, and while the undergrad prize is just for students at QUT, the postgrad prize is for people studying  anywhere around the country. And the winner is, Jack Vening for The Tourists.

JACK VENING: And once again they both laughed in perfect unison. It was loud and unashamed, like it was the most natural thing in the world for them to laugh like that. What's funny, I asked. He said something else to his wife as he moved off and they laughed longer and louder and Stainslaus gripped the front of his coat and he walked and put his hands over his eyes and he shook. I got that feeling, the one that time had passed without my knowing and the world had turned as I had slept too late. I imagined too, looking at them as they were hysterical with grief, that they had just learned something impossible and it had driven them mad.