Writing Beyond Rejection and Winning

An Interview with O'Hunt by Clara Zimban

O’Hunt had received 75 rejections when she discovered Winds of Asia Award. Though she had lost much hope in her writing pursuits, she couldn’t resist entering the contest when she realized her short story Meena matched the submission guidelines perfectly. She was shocked to discover the Kinsman Quarterly contest was free to enter, so what did she have to lose?

“I sent my story out immediately,” O’Hunt told Kinsman Quarterly in a recent interview. “On the day of the announcements, I just tried not to think about the results and be happy enough to be on the longlist, but I was still quite anxious, so I tried to distract myself by working out, cooking, and going about my day as usual. When I received the email with winners and finalists, I actually started reading the honorable mentions and finalists first, and my name wasn’t there. At last, I checked the names of the winners and realized I was placed first!”

O'Hunt, the award-winning author of "Meena," is an India-born immigrant of Mississauga, Canada who enjoys reading, the outdoors, anime, dream journaling, and podcasts.

O’Hunt’s fiction piece Meena was announced as the grand prize winner of the Winds of Asia Award. The short story offers a quiet power that draws readers into the layered realities of Indian culture through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist. Navigating the blurred lines between complicity and redemption, empathy and guilt, O’Hunt offers a peek into the lives of people who, like its title character, have been silenced by an oppressive caste-based and patriarchal system.

The author herself, an immigrant in Canada, was born and raised in Gujarat, India, and through her story, she gives a glimpse into aspects of her culture that need awareness.

“There are millions of people who suffer just because of an accident of birth—for being born to poor parents and in, what society categorizes as, lower castes,” O’Hunt explains. “And that is manifold worse for girls and women born in that socio-economic stratum. This is a factual reality and statistics prove it. Yet, there is a lot of online discourse nowadays trying to invalidate or discredit these realities, especially when a woman narrates her plight.”

When writing the tale, O’Hunt feared that the reality of India’s caste system might be lost in translation with North American markets, but she persisted with her message, hoping that a reader who wasn’t aware of the caste system would be emotionally moved by the universal truths embedded within the prose.

The short story medium has historically served as a powerful platform to raise political issues and revisit them through the lens of fiction. O’Hunt honors this literary tradition, blending storytelling and social commentary to craft a narrative with resonance and purpose. She accomplished this by writing and submitting her work regardless of previous disappointments and rejections.

The grand-prize-winning story Meena offers what all great stories do—a thread to pull, a new set of questions to ask, and the picture of someone’s experience to observe through a digestible lens.

“That is what art is supposed to do, isn’t it? Shift our perception and increase our sensitivity towards others and the world at large.”

"Meena” and other culturally rich stories and poetry from the Asian diaspora will be featured in the upcoming anthology "Winds of Asia" — now available for pre-order here.

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"The cover art for the Winds of Asia anthology is so vivid and colorful, and the beautiful woman on the cover is exactly how I imagined the titular character of my story Meena as a grown woman."

— O'Hunt, Winds of Asia Award-Winning Author