Uzair Khan wins Landfall Tauraka Young Writers’ Essay Prize 2026

By Landfall Tauraka | Posted: Tuesday May 19, 2026

Tāmaki Makaurau resident Uzair Khan has been announced as the winner of this year’s Landfall Tauraka Young Writers’ Essay Prize.

His winning essay, ‘The Bright Ones,’ explores what it means to be seventeen and ambitious in a country that treats ambition with gentle scepticism. Here, Khan tries to bridge the gap between wanting to leave and not being old enough to go.

‘I noticed that a lot of conversations I have with adults about my future follow a very similar script. I say what I want to do; they pause, and then they say something encouraging in a tone that isn’t. I wanted to write about that pattern, and also about the fact that the education system I’m in was designed somewhere else and seems to lead somewhere else, and nobody really talks about what that means.’

Currently a Year 13 student at Auckland Grammar School, Khan unpacks the complex and often conflicting decisions many young people in Aotearoa New Zealand face when thinking about their futures.

‘When a country keeps producing young people who feel they have to leave in order to become themselves, the question worth asking isn’t why they go; it’s what the country is doing (or not doing) that makes staying feel impossible.’

‘I knew I wanted to write about my circumstances, but I didn’t want it to be a complaint. The hardest part was finding the right balance between honesty about what frustrated me and honesty about what I love. I went in thinking the essay was about wanting to leave, and by the time I finished, I realised it was really about the ache of loving somewhere you don’t think you can stay.’

Landfall Tauraka editor and essay prize judge, Lynley Edmeades, commends Khan for this honest account of a truth often commented on but never explored in depth.

‘This essay does a fine job of acknowledging the speaker’s own privilege while also interrogating the ideologies these messages contain. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, I thought we were long past the idea that real life was something that happened outside Aotearoa; Khan proves otherwise, showing us how deeply ingrained and unconscious this dominant ideology still is.

‘He pushes that further, looking to speak the truth of that idea that often goes unspoken, that “it’s probably for the best,” due to their being a “bit too much.” Too much for what or for whom? Too smart? Too honest? Too ambitious? How is it that this “too-muchness” continues to dominate our collective ideology? These are some uncomfortable questions we need to ask ourselves, and this essay opens the space for them.’

The highly commended essays are ‘How to say “identity” in te reo Māori’ by Tia McCallum, ‘Taga ibang bansa’ by Dorothy Baricuatro and ‘What she kept’ by Oliver Jull. Commended were ‘Token queens’ by Tunmise Adebowale, ‘The question of godwits (and life)’ by Kate Atkinson and ‘It’s the specifics that wreck you’ by Stella Weston.

The Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Prize is proudly sponsored by Otago University Press, the University of Otago Department of English and Linguistics, and Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

Visit oup.nz for more information about Landfall Tauraka 251

For a review copy or to arrange an extract or interview, please email publicity@otago.ac.nz