Announcing the winner of the WestWords Prize 

2)      Your manuscript deals quite deftly with diasporic experience. Was this a part of your initial designs for the story? What was it about these emotions you wished to share with a reader, and what is your hope for how they are interpreted? 

My main aim was to tell a story that shows the life of a person who experienced severe trauma and loss and how she manages to live a life after such a traumatic experience. My main aim was to answer the question: how to go on living when there is nothing to live for, how to find beauty in this ugly word.

3) While your novel deals closely with a specific context — a specific peoples and a specific war — there is something elegantly universal about the experience of your lead character’s journey. Her experience, the ramifications of what she learns and how she changes, could be mapped onto many wars and situations around the world. How did you approach this while working on the story? Is it something you thought about while writing? 

The story is set in a particular context, the Bosnian War in the 1990s. However, the aim was never to write a historical novel that explains causes, consequences, etc of that war. That is why I made up a fictional town and stick loosely to the time frame of the war. However, the experiences of the people, regardless of the war, or other traumatic events, would be very similar. In particular, the experiences of being persecuted for no other reason but being yourself, being displaced, made homeless, losing family and loved ones, losing one’s identity.

4) How closely aligned is the fictional world of this novel, and your own experiences? As a writer, do you aim to keep these separate, or do you encourage the personal ‘cross-over’ while writing? 

The story is informed by some of my own experiences, but it is really an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard over the years. I like to ‘tap into’ what I know, so the starting point is my own experience, but that is just the starting point.

This particular story started with the image of the character Boro nailing down the chickens in his parents’ yard. I knew someone who really did that when he was left to mind the chicken. He seemed like an affable guy otherwise. When the war started, he was one of the first to take a gun and shoot at us.

5) While admittedly there is fear, anger, and turmoil within this novel, at its heart there is love, hope, and joy. How important was this balance to you, while writing? Is it part of the book’s messaging? 

I would be very disappointed if the book left the reader bereft and hopeless of a better future. I think one of the purposes of literature is not just to imitate reality but to provide us with some answers. My main aim here was to answer the question: how to find a way forward when everything seems lost.

6) Is there anything else you wish to add, about the process of writing this novel, and your hope for how it will be received? 

It is my baby but it has grown, and I’m ready for people to get to know it. There is always anxiety whether people will like your child, but, in the end, the child needs to fend for themselves. I just hope that I have instilled the right values in my baby so that it can do that.

Keep and eye out for Vahida’s debut novel, set to release 2026 by WestWords Books. 

About the manuscript:

Selma is a Bosnian refugee whose family was exterminated in a massacre in the Bosnian War. Trying to lock up her grief and survivor guilt, she has built a near-perfect life – complete with a new husband and child – in Australia with hardly any reminders of her past. However, when she hears about the extradition of a war criminal to Den Hague, her emotional armour is pierced. Memories flood her dreams, leading her to neglect her job, her family, and she almost loses her life in a car accident when she is momentarily overwhelmed by a memory from her first wedding. Selma realises that she needs to find the bodies of her loved ones, bury them, and grieve for them. Selma and her only living cousin Damir return to their hometown in Bosnia. There, nothing is as it used to be. The town is full of characters who were complicit in the genocide. Selma becomes somewhat unhinged and risks her own life when she attempts to get her house back from the people now living in it.

About the author: 

Vahida Berberovic is a storyteller who teaches English and Communications at UTS Sydney. She is a refugee from Bosnia, and her writing investigates big themes in the small detail of the lives of people like herself. She has written two novels, two novellas and several short stories. She has been awarded an international writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a writing residency at the Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains.

Her fiction and poetry have been published in literary magazines, most recently in The Writers’ Journal, Cape magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Down in the Dirt, Quail Bell and Ariel Chart. Her re-imagining of the tale of Snow White is featured in the anthology Women of Myth.

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Amy Anshaw-Nye – The Maydown Girls

May Ngo – The River

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