The pain of rejection never entirely vanishes. But for practising writers, disappointment can be instructive, even inspiring. If a longlist you’d hoped to appear on is populated with other, better writers, then the result at least makes sense. With more work, it might be you next year.

What should entrants in the 2019 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award take from their experience? This year, the judges have declined to award the prize to anyone, the third time this has occurred in the competition’s history. Last time, in 2013, then-judge Geordie Williamson explained that the panel could not find ‘…that special quality that a winning entry has’, despite the fact that the judges found ‘many entries we admired, many we thought had real promise, and many we returned to again and again.’