Emerging Writers Series: Kgshak Akec
"Just put your work out there, and be a real champion for yourself. It’s important to see the flaws in your work and to work on making it better, but don’t scrap entire ideas – there’s a reason you connected with them in the first place.”
Kgshak Akec was six when her family immigrated to Australia to start a new life. In her debut novel, Hopeless Kingdom, she takes inspiration from their years of trying to find a sense of belonging in a new home to tell the story of Teresai and her daughter Akita, two Sudanese women trying to survive and thrive. In the book, we get a nuanced look into a delicate mother-daughter relationship and how trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next, no matter what country you call home.
Hopeless Kingdom was the 2021 joint winner of the Dorothy Hewett Award, and after reading it, I had the chance to chat to Kgshak about the connections between life and fiction, her journey to writing, and the publication of her very first novel.
Could you tell us a little about your journey to becoming a writer and what inspired you to start writing in the first place?
Ever since I was a little kid, I loved storytelling. And although this love was only supercharged throughout primary school, I fell into writing accidentally. As a child of migrants, you have this pressure on your shoulders to provide, so going into the arts was definitely seen as a risky career step. Most migrant kids don’t deviate from careers that are deemed “safe,” so I studied subjects that I thought would ensure that I ended up within a safe career as well.
Writing was always a hobby, but as the years went by, I dedicated more and more time to it – after uni classes or a long shift at work, I would come home and write. It started to take up too big a part of my life for me to ignore it any longer. So in 2020, when we went into lockdown, I had all the time and I took it upon myself to go on this personal writing endeavour. I was reflecting a lot on what home meant to me, and my relationships with my family, especially my mum. This, combined with existing ideas floating around in my head, inspired me to finally sit down and start writing. This project, by far the biggest I’d ever done, turned into something so much bigger than myself – which is now Hopeless Kingdom.
Even though it was the longest piece of writing I’d ever done, it only took me three months to complete a first draft. I’d wake up early, and have this feeling weighing down on me. The only way to get rid of it was to get this story down on paper.
I know that Hopeless Kingdom was inspired by your own experience of migration from Africa to Australia, but can you tell us how much of you and your experiences are in the characters of your book?
So much of it! When I first wrote Hopeless Kingdom, it was almost autobiographical. The more I wrote of it, the more it dawned on me that it was going to go out into the world, and so I felt the need to create a safe separation between my life and the characters of the book. The more I wrote about these characters as well, the more they became people of their own, separate from me and my mother. This separation creates an opportunity for people from anywhere reading the book to connect with the characters, so it was very much a conscious choice.
That very special but often very complicated relationship between siblings plays a massive part in this book – how have your relationship with your own siblings influenced Hopeless Kingdom?
I’m one of nine siblings; I’m the middle child. My mum also has many siblings, so I grew up in a big family with a lot of cousins and relatives always around.
Because there were so many of us siblings, different groups formed, with the older siblings having their own crew, and the younger siblings having their own crew, which left me, my older brother and my younger sister to come together. I have a lot of fun memories from this time, but we did get up to a lot of mischief.
As I grew up, I changed internally and this reflected externally too. Having an older brother who always looked out for me but always got me into a lot of trouble shaped who I am. In Hopeless Kingdom, Akita’s relationship with her older brother Santo forms a central plotline, and I wanted to give her this complicated relationship because I thought there was a lot of value in it too.
There are a lot of sisters in this book, and many of them have names that start with an A. Was this done on purpose? Can you tell me a bit more about your decision behind this?
That was a Sudanese inside joke. A lot of girl names, especially in my tribe, start with the letter A. Six out of my eight siblings have names that start with A, and so for a long time, before my two younger brothers were born, I was the only one with a name that didn’t start with an A. It was something that people made fun of while I was growing up, and so I wanted to incorporate this into the book too, to make fun of it in my own way.
The two brothers, Akita's brother and Teresai's brother, couldn't be any more different from one another. Was this a conscious choice, or did it come organically?
It was a bit of both. A lot of the first draft came organically, and then as part of the second draft, I had the chance to go back and refine or add in further connections. Akita was a reflection of her mother in a sense, and I really enjoyed playing with these mirror relationships and how they influenced each character. So, both of their relationships to their brothers speak to each other. It brings them together, but also creates a separation in the way they relate to each other – something that the reader can easily discern from the double narrative, but it’s not that obvious in the characters’ lived experiences.
Now, let’s talk about the creation of the book. Hopeless Kingdom won the 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript – but what was the journey like before that point? What about afterwards?
By the time I finished writing the first draft, I was very passionate about getting it out there, so I started researching writing competitions, awards or publishing houses that were open to emerging writers. I didn’t even know some of these opportunities existed until I looked for them! I researched a couple of competitions, looked into the panel of judges, bought previous winners’ works – really put in the work. I submitted my manuscript to The Vogel Award, and they got back to me in September to let me know that they’d picked a winner, and unfortunately it wasn’t me. That was a big blow. This was the first time I’d really poured my heart into this one thing, put it out there in public, and it was hard to come to terms with the fact that it was rejected. It took me a month to come back to the manuscript and rework it top to bottom. By November, I saw that my new and improved manuscript aligned really well with the Dorothy Hewett Award, so I submitted it to that. Then, in the same week of March, I found out that not only had Hopeless Kingdom been shortlisted for The Vogel Award (and they just couldn’t tell me in September), but it was also named the joint winner of the Dorothy Hewett Award. I was beside myself with excitement!
The Dorothy Hewett Award came with a publishing contract with UWA Publishing, and so I worked with their wonderful team for nine months, editing and tweaking the book, working on the cover illustration, finalising everything. And then finally, Hopeless Kingdom came out in August 2022. It was a long process, but a beautiful one.
What would be your advice to other emerging writers who want to get published?
Just put your work out there, and be a real champion for yourself. It’s important to see the flaws in your work and to work on making it better, but don’t scrap entire ideas – there’s a reason you connected with them in the first place. This is something I’m still learning myself, to not let my self critique get in the way.
What's next for you?
I have been sitting with a host of new characters for the best part of the last six to eight months. I think my next novel is in its very early stages, but I have the same feeling I got with Hopeless Kingdom, this urge to get it all out. Which I think is good news! I’m also still enjoying the novelty of public speaking and attending writers’ festivals – it’s all very exciting.
Kgshak Akec is a South-Sudanese writer, performing artist, storyteller, and a lover of words. Since the moment she learned how to write in English at the age of six, Kgshak has been writing out the stories that live inside her mind. As a migrant and non-native English speaker, Kgshak is fascinated by the unspoken words and unsung songs of the day-to-day, she finds herself drawn to stories that challenge perception and go against the grain of the expected while also being grounded in truth. Her debut novel Hopeless Kingdom (UWAP 2022), inspired by her own journey of migrating to Australia, explores the relationship of a mother and daughter as they settle, break, evolve, and adapt in new lands through multiple heartaches and triumphs.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.