Our writing award – the Pat Skinner award

Financial constraints mean All into Ocean Pools Inc will not be offering a writing award in 2019.

Past writing awards

All Into Ocean Pools inc established a writing award in honour of the late Pat Skinner for a piece of original writing relating to one or more of the ocean pools (Australasian ocean pools, South African ocean pools, American ocean pools, European ocean pools) listed on the All into Ocean Pools Inc website. All into Ocean Pools Inc intended the Pat Skinner Award to attract a wide range of fiction and non-fiction entries, in literary forms ranging from poems, essays, short stories, blogposts and anthologies to reports and histories and perhaps even some longer works.

The Pat Skinner Award for writing was offered in 2017 and 2018. It attracted entries relating to specific ocean pools in Australia, the UK, Portugal, Spain and other countries  as well as entries looking at broader groupings of the world’s ocean pools. Only writing in digital formats could be considered for this award. While uploaded entries had to be less than 5 MB in size, the upload could supply a link allowing our judges to view a larger entry online. There were no entry fees for this award and we welcomed entries from persons or groups of any age, background or location.

2018 Pat Skinner Award results

Our 2018 writing judges decided not to award any prize-money 
for the 2018 Pat Skinner Award for writing
 about ocean pools. They did however award two
 Honourable Mentions.

• our member, Caroline Josephs (yes, the same
 Caroline Josephs awarded prize- money for our
 2018 members-only Shirley Ellis Art Award) for
 Memory — Palm Beach Ocean Pool, her memoir
 of the time ‘in 1947 at four and three quarter years
of age I learned to float in Palm Beach Ocean
Pool. This bodily experience began a lifetime of 
love of ocean pools. I am now 75 years’, and
• Jane Downing for her story Hurly-Burly,
 ‘a piece of short fiction remembering the
 Burleigh Heads ocean pool’ that once existed on
 Queensland’s Gold Coast.

2017 Pat Skinner Award results

For results of the 2017 award go here.