Istoria Timor Inaugurual Competition Results

Winners:

1. Ha'u Maka Lucas - Teodozio Batista Ximenes


2. Tinan Ikus Iha Kolegio - Marciano da C. Fernandes


3. Tuku 11 - Irim Tolentino


4. Tinta Nurak - Edmundo Corbafo


5. Loron Abang Nakonu ho Esperansa by Atanasio Maria Pinto


6. Matan Ben ho Esperansa - Betty Reis

Runners up (in no particular order):

• Atauro by Amelino Fernandes


• Subar Domin Sai Realidade - Maria Madalena


• Harohan Ida hose Matebian Sira - Fransisco Pinto Amaral


• Lalaok Domin - Flash C. Guterres (Preman 69)

A proper write-up of the event last Saturday will follow.

Invitation: Istoria Timor Award Ceremony - Memorial da Paz, Lecidere. Saturday, August 1, 16:30

Friends,

You are all invited to the Award Ceremony for the inaugural Istoria Timor Writing Competition.

The Istoria Timor project received 10 entries during the competition run in 2008-2009. The novellas, each between 10,000 and 20,000 words, are from a range of genres and were Timorese men and women of all backgrounds and ages. These novellas represent (as far as we are aware) the first long-form, written fiction ever to be widely disseminated in Timor-Leste's indigenous national language: Tetum.

There is $1,300 in prize money to be awarded.

The afternoon will include a theatrical performance by Klibur Artista Teatru no Muzika Timor-Leste, poetry readings by Abe Baretto, Sandra Tilman and Naldo Rei and music from Melchior Dias Fernandes (Mely).

The ceremony will be held at Memorial da Paz, Lecidere (in front of the Bishop's house) from 16:30 to 18:00 on Saturday, August 1, 2009.

Please come and forward this to any and all who may be interested.

John
Istoria Timor

Australia East Timor Friendship School Project

In response to the concept note I sent out a few weeks ago, I received an email from Jan Hayes of the Australia East Timor Friendship School Project (FSP) saying that we should apply for funds.

A little more information on FSP follows:

Dear Supporter,

The Australia East Timor Friendship School Project (FSP) was established in Australia in 2003 to create mutual learning opportunities for primary and secondary school communities in Australia and schools in Timor-Leste. Through these activities the project aimed to build generations of international friendship by creating lasting connections and understanding between the students from both countries. Close to 100 Australian schools have taken part in the project, many partnered to a school in Timor-Leste.

For reasons that have been advised previously, we have regrettably come to the conclusion that, due to ongoing difficulties with program delivery in Timor, it is appropriate to wind up AETFSP Ltd activities in Australia. This means that the co-ordination role played by staff in our office at AEU has been discontinued. We know that some schools will continue their relationships with partner schools in Timor-Leste via their local Friendship Group. We are confident that relationships between schools, communities, teachers and students in Australia and Timor-Leste will continue, but in a different form.

Australia East Timor Friendship School Project Ltd currently holds approximately A$40,000, which we intend to distribute as part of the process of winding up the organisation. This document invites groups and organisations working in Timor-Leste to apply for access to this pool for one-off funding for education-related projects.
Details of criteria and the application process are contained in the attached document. Feel free to distribute it to others you feel may be interested in applying.

As you may be aware, the project also generated and distributed a range of curriculum materials and resources. Most of this material is available on line either from the Alola Foundation (see http://www.alolafoundation.org/fsi.php) or the Asia Education Foundation (see http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/public_html/online_resources.htm). There are a few hard-copy resources (books, DVDs etc) in the office. We will be going through those in the next few weeks so if you are interested in taking these types of resources for your future school activities, please let me know.

Thanks for your interest and involvement in the project.

Yours sincerely,

Jan Hayes
Chair
Australia East Timor Friendship School Project Ltd

I'm still looking for an organisation to take over the project for when we leave Timor-Leste in December, but I would happily assist any such organisation in applying for funds through FSP.

Potential assistance from the Australian government

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) administers a program of small grants known as the Direct Aid Program (DAP) that offers grants, typically between $3000 and $10,000 to individuals, community groups and NGOs engaged in development activities, in designated countries, on a not-for-profit basis.

I have heard, informally, from people within the Australian embassy that Istoria Timor is exactly the sort of thing that they look for to fund. As I have said before, my preference is that we can find an organisation with a local office to take over the project from now. While I will not apply for the DAP grant myself, I am certainly happy to help, say, a local NGO apply for funds to take this project to completion.

If anyone is interested, the project is ready to go and there's money out there for it.

Funding

We are ready to present the prizes today (well, as of last week actually), but we chose to schedule the event in August to give me a little time to do some more fundraising.

We hope that we can secure in-principle funding of approximately US$10,000 before the event is to be held. We have some interest from some local organisations and some leads so we'll see how we go.

If you would like to know more about the project and the funding needs for the printing, etc. please see our concept note.

Finalists

As previously published, the first Istoria Timor writing competition has now closed and we have received 10 entries. The entries received are as follows:

• Atauro by Amelino "Ano" Fernandes


• Loron Abang Nakonu ho Esperansa by Atanasio Maria Pinto


• Matan Ben ho Esperansa - Betty Reis


• Tinta Nurak - Edmundo "Cono" Corbafo


• Lalaok Domin - Flash C. Guterres (Preman 69)


• Tuku 11 - Irim Tolentino


• Subar Domin Sai Realidade - Maria "Lena" Madalena


• Tinan Ikus Iha Kolegio - Marciano da C. Fernandes


• Harohan Ida hose Matebian Sira - Fransisco Pinto Amaral


• Ha'u Maka Lucas - Teodozio "Teo" Batista Ximenes

Judges will be selected over the coming weeks and we expect to announce the winners by the end of May 2009.

Judging

We had our coordination meeting last Saturday at Motion in Mercado Lama, the main aim of which was to decide a fair and transparent way to coordinate the judging process.

We were joined by most of the writers, some of their friends, and Maun Abe - a well respected Timorese poet and active member of the artistic community.

I was very keen to ensure that we draw judges from as many walks of life as possible and had come up with all sorts of complicated methods to ensure the balance of men and women, young and old, literary types and non-literary types, and so on. After over an hour of discussing the pros and cons of the different methods, one of the writers interrupted and said "look... We trust you and Maun Abe. How about the two of you get together and work it out yourselves?" Everyone agreed, so that's what we're doing. As most of the judges will be from Maun Abe's and my (considerably smaller) social circle of literary types, this does make it a little less democratic and will make it difficult to get participation from out in the foho. That said, it will be a lot simpler and quicker. Also, Maun Abe and I are very conscious of these limitations, and we think that, with care, we can select a good, balanced panel that will help us pick a winner.

I was in Indonesia for most of last week so we didn't get a chance to meet again yet, but we hope to start contacting people and asking them if they would be willing to be judges this week.

We have taken nominations from the writers and have a few ideas ourselves, but if there are any readers out there have any suggestions or feel qualified themselves then let us know.

Competition closed

The Istoria Timor competition is now closed!

We have received 10 entries and official judging will commence shortly. We're having a coordination meeting this Saturday to work out how the judging is going to work and
generally discuss the project.

The way I hope to judge the project is by putting out a call for judges among the universities and high schools. They will submit a form with their name, age, gender, contact details and 100 words on why they should be a judge. The writers will then pick 10-20 to read all of the stories. We'll give them a month or so to read all of the entries and then take their judgments as final. Of course, these are all my ideas, I'm going to put them to the writers and see what they think.

As Shelley and I are leaving Timor in December, I want this project to be as sustainable as possible. So I'm in no particular hurry to decide on a winner. I want to create a community of writers that could potentially run this competition next year, so I'm going to take it slow and try to get as much of this done by the authors themselves. Conservatively, we should have a winner by late May/early June.

I'll then shop the winner (and possibly the runner up) around to all of the local NGOs to see if we can find someone to print it. The quote we have from a local printing company is that it was cost around $8000 to edit, and then print 5000 copies of the book including layout.

Exciting times.

Competition launched / Kompetisaun Komesa Tiha Ona

We launched the competition on Wednesday the first of October 2008 by sending an announcement to the ETAN mailing list and starting to hand out and stick up the flyers.

Our Tetum flyer*

We've had a great response so far with a lot of people calling up and emailing saying they want to enter. Journalists have been the most common occupation but we have had interest from office workers, students, theatre troupe members, waitresses, security guards and even a few people who are looking for work.

Their first question is normally "does it need to be history or can we write in fiction?". As I alluded to in an earlier post, unfortunately our project name has a bit of a historical ring to it so this confusion is understandable... We're still in the market for a new name if anyone has a good suggestion.

We are in talks with a few different organisation that may be able to help us promote this nationwide including CARE (who publish the excellent Lafaek magazine that gets sent to every single school student in the country once a month), a World Bank program that has connections to youth centres all over the country and two different national journalist associations.

Local journalist Steph March who reports for Radio Australia came and interviewed me the day we launched the competition and this report hit the airwaves this morning. Probably not terribly useful in getting the word out to potential contestants, but will be quite useful for finding funding sources once we move on to the printing stage.

In addition to interviewing people that we are lending books to, I'd like to start interviewing writers too. I'm off to Indonesia tomorrow or the day after, but I'll try and get an interview with an author up here soon.

If you'd like to help us promote the competition, please email me at johnholdaway (at) gmail (dot) com.

* I stole the image of the reading crocodile (well, technically it's an alligator) from the website I acknowledged on the flyer. I tried to contact the guy who drew it but he never responded... Oh well, we are a non-profit organisation, hopefully he won't mind.

PS - If you are the guy I stole the image from, let us know if you want us to stop using it and we'll find a new one.

Se mak Ami?/ Who are we?

Kompetisaun Hakerek Istoria Sira Timor Nian ne'e patrosina husi Timor Aid no Fundasaun Alola ne'ebe konesidu liu iha Timor Leste ho nia programa ne'ebe foka liu ba Edukasaun no Dalen Nasional.

Istoria Timor Short Story Competition is sponsored by Fundasaun Alola and Timor Aid, leading NGOs in Timor Leste with a focus on Education and National Language.

The Project/ Informasaun Projectu/ Informasi Proyek

For Indonesian please see below - sorry, no Tetum yet.
Untuk Bahasa Indonesia silahkan lihat di bawah - maaf, belum ada Bahasa Tetum.
Atu lian Indonesia, haree iha okos - deskulpa, sidauk iha lian Tetum.

In a nutshell, Istoria Timor hopes to publish the first novel ever written in Tetum. The project has two phases as follows:

Phase 1: Writing competition

We are running a writing competition accepting entries of between 10,000 and 15,000 words. The winner will receive US$500 and the chance to have their story published and distributed nation-wide. There are also five US$100 prizes available to runners up. This phase of the project is fully funded.

Phase 2: Editing, publishing and distribution

If, in the opinion of Istoria Timor, the received stories are fit to publish, the project will edit and print 5,000 copies of the book and look to distribute them nation-wide. Istoria Timor are accepting pledges for this phase of the project but will not begin accepting cash donations until Phase 1 is complete and management are confident in the marketability of the product.

For more detailed information, please see our project concept note.

---

Secara singkat, proyek Istoria Timor bermaksud untuk menerbitkan buku roman pertama dalam Bahasa Tetum. Proyek ini ada dua tahap sebagai berikut:

Tahap 1: Kompetisi menulis

Kami mengadakan sebuah kompetisi menulis untuk menerima masukan di antara 10,000 dan 15,000 kata. Naskah terbaik akan terima hadiah uang sebesar US$500 dan mendapat kesempatan untuk melihat karyanya diterbitkan di seluruh negara Timor Leste. Selain dari hadiah pertama, juga ada lima hadiah sebesar US$100 untuk 5 orang finalis. Tahap pertama proyek Istoria Timor sudah mempunyai semua dana yang diperlukan.

Tahap 2: Penyuntingan, penerbitan dan pendistribusian

Jika, dalam pendapat Istoria Timor, naskah yang diterima siap untuk diterbitkan, proyek Istoria Timor akan menyunting dan mencetak 5000 buku dan mendistribusikannya ke keseluruhan negara Timor Leste. Proyek Istoria Timor tidak akan menerima sumbangan dalam bentuk tunai untuk tahap ini sampai Tahap 1 sudah selesai dan manajemen Istoria Timor sudah pasti bahwa cerita yang diterima cukup bagus untuk dipublikasikan. Kalau ingin menyumbang pada waktu kami sudah mulai menerima sumbangan, silahkan hubungi kami.

Untuk informasi lebih lanjut, silahkan membacadokumen informasi proyek (maaf, masih dalam Bahasa Inggris).

Kestaun Sira/FAQs

Karik Ita iha kestaun ruma, favor husik hela Ita-nia komentariu iha postu ne'e no tuirmai ami sei hatama ba lista.

1. Kona-ba Saida mak ha'u bele hakerek?

Saida de'it! Ami labele hatete ba Ita-Boot sira kona-ba saida mak Ita bele no labele hakerek. Durante hakerek ne'e ho dalen tetun no forma hanesan istoria (lahanesan ho artigu ka teze ruma) ami kontete ona. "Istoria" Iha kompetisaun ne'e lo'os Istoria (Ind. Sejarah maibe Cerita, Ing. La'os History maibe Story) ne'ebe hakerek maizoumenus tenki ho lifuan to'o 10,000.

2. Se mak seui korrizedor iha kompetisaun ne'e?

Sra Kirsty Sword Gusmao
Sr Joao Paulo
Sra Maria do Ceu
Sr Naldo Rei
Sr Nunu Belo
Sr Abe Baretto Soares

3. Oinsa mak Ha'u atu aprezenta Ha'u-nia istoria?

Favor haruka hela Ita-Boot nia istoria ba email: istoriatimor@timoraid.org

4. Saida mak vensedor sira sei simu?

Premiu dahuluk: $500
Premiu daruak: $200
Premiu datoluk: $100

Tinan dia ne'e mos sei iha premiu ida ho folin $500 ba istoria husi feto sira nian ne'ebe di'ak liu.

5. Bainhira mak aprezentasaun Istoria sira ramata?

Aprezentasaun istoria sira sei remata iha 30 fulan Junu 2010 no anunsiu ba vensedor sira iha fulan Agostu 2010.

If you have more questions, please leave a comment on this post and we will add it to the list.

1. What should I write about?

Anything! We don't want to tell people what they can or can not write about. As long as it is in Tetum and is structured like a story (as opposed to an article or an essay) then we're happy. "Istoria" in Portuguese means "history" while in Tetum it has two meanings: "history" and "story". We mean "story". Remember, the story must be at least 10,000 words.

2. Who will judge the competition?

The judging panel, appointed by Timor Aid and Fundasaun Alola, is:

Sra Kirsty Sword Gusmao
Sr Joao Paulo
Sra Maria do Ceu
Sr Naldo Rei
Sr Nunu Belo
Sr Abe Baretto Soares

3. How do I submit my story?

Please email your story to istoriatimor@timoraid.org

4. What does the winner receive?

First prize is $500
Second prize is $200
Third prize is $100

This year, there will also be a prize of $500 for the best story from a female entrant.

5. When do entries close?

Entries close on Wednesday 30 June with the winners to be announced in August.

Concept note

So, we've prepared a draft concept note, sent it out to a list of friends and got a lot of good comments. I'm in Indonesia for a few weeks at the moment and Shelley is off to Australia shortly but we'll work on a new version and distribute it more broadly.

Once we get the final round of comments on the concept note we'll post it up here and look at launching the competition, target date: mid-late September.

Name change

Well, that was quick...

After shopping it around a bit, it turns out that Istoria Lorosae sounds a little controversial to some ears. A little history for those who just joined us: during the crisis of 2006, a lot of the violence was due to tensions between the easterners and the westerners. That's not the East Timorese and the West Timorese, but people from the eastern and the western ends of Timor Leste. It turns out that, while it's a lovely word, Lorosae still carries with it a little too much political baggage.

So, um... Any suggestions?

In the meantime we're going with Istoria Timor. It's not perfect. It sounds a little historical, but it will do for now. I'm perfectly happy to change it again if anyone has any better suggestions.

This is what you get when you have clueless malae (foreigners) trying to name projects...

Testing the market

A few weeks ago the little brother, Dato, of a friend of ours was over at our house. We have a small collection of Indonesian novels so we offered him a pile of them. Our collection is pretty meager, a little bit of literature (Ayu Utami, Remy Sylado), some poetry, a couple of teen novels and a dodgy horror book. Being a teenage boy, when it was time to go Dato was completely engrossed in Kuntilanak; a novelisation of a pretty bad Indonesian horror movie about kuntilanaks (Shelley bought it because she was interested in Indonesian monsters and wanted to know more; unfortunately for her Indonesian horror movies don't make any sense). Dato asked to borrow the book and, of course, we were very happy to hand it over. I ran into his older brother a week or so later and he said he had started reading it too.

So we decided to lend out a few more of our books and, so far, the response has been really positive. To add a bit of flavour to the blog, from now on we're planning on interviewing all of the people we lend books to to see what sort of things they read, what they like, what they do and so on.

Stay tuned for the first update.

Greetings

Hi there,

This is our new blog to chart the development of the Istoria Lorosae project. Istoria is a Portuguese loan word meaning story or stories, and Lorosae literally means rising sun, but is generally used to mean "east" in Tetum; so: Stories from the East. The project, broadly, is focused on literacy in Timor Leste. Specifically, we hope that it will encourage young Timorese to read and (hopefully) to write.

We're still working on the concept note at the moment but, in a nutshell, we're hoping that we can play a key role in the publishing of the first novel ever published in Tetum. A lofty goal to be sure; but we're hoping we can give it a big kick in the right direction with just a few hundred bucks and a bit of (hopefully free) promotion. From then on we'll need to start fundraising, but if the prior stages go as well as we hope, it (hopefully) shouldn't be too hard.

So, this blog is intended to report on any progress we make, any events we hold and just generally anything we feel is peripherally related to literacy in Timor Leste.

Anyway, we'll keep you posted.

John & Shelley