The Sudden Writing Prize 2025 Winner - Ledya Khamou
In 2025, Express Media worked with AAWP in judging the Sudden Writing Prize.
Below is the winning piece, ‘Food Baby’ by Ledya Khamou.
Ledya Khamou is a writer and Honours student at the University of Melbourne.
Judges’ report: ‘Food Baby’ was selected as the 2025 winner of the AAWP and Express Media Sudden Writing Prize for its bold exploration of the taboo space where love and bowel movements intersect. Lines like ‘There’s other tallying widgets on the app, like and “I love you” counter, but we only use the pooping widget’ capture the author’s deft use of humour to convey—in candid detail—their sense of embodied love and search for control. 'Food Baby' made us laugh even as it made us ponder its universal themes of control and intimacy or lack-there-of.
Second place: ‘second adolescence’ by Saanjana Kapoor
Third place: ‘January’ by Eden Crain
Shortlisted/Commended: ‘Exit Sign’ by Nimrada Silva and ‘The River Watches Me’ by Parvati Dinesh
Food Baby
Ledya Khamou
The truth is that I am always thinking about my bowel movements. I have an app on my phone wherein I tally the amount of times I have pooped in a day. Joshua has the same app. There’s other tallying widgets on the app, like an “I love you” counter, but we only use the pooping widget.
Joshua has a straightforward relationship with pooping, and a straightforward relationship with me. The more he poops in a day, the better he feels. The more time he spends with me, the more he likes me.
My relationship with poop is precarious. The poop-tracker app has a colour-coded calendar that shows your poop history. I frequently check the calendar. I am satisfied when my month is an array of beiges and sunflower yellows, some spots of white, which indicates zero to two poops a day. Anything above two poops is colour-coded an ugly mustard, like iron-heavy piss.
Mustard means that I have eaten too much. When I eat too little, I have to run on the treadmill for a minimum of ten minutes to trigger a bowel movement. I like running, I like straining on the toilet, I like feeling that I have worked for my shit.
When I want white calendar days, I don’t eat lunch. Joshua says, “You’re the anti-Frank O’Hara.” He likes poetry. He reads me ‘Having A Coke With You’ in his bed while I stare at the ceiling. The names of galleries and painters and foreign cities fall off his tongue easily, like he dropped his keys. His parents are teachers, his brother directs the local theatre. My dad delivers pizzas. I have not left Australia since migrating when I was too young to remember. I try to picture San Sebastian or the Polish Rider. I see nothing on the ceiling, except the white paint and the dust coating the ventilator grilles.
I think Joshua reads me poetry instead of saying “I love you.” When he stumbles on a line, he starts the poem over from the beginning—it means a lot to him, which makes me so sad, I can hardly bear it. We talk a lot about our insides. Sometimes we describe the quality of our feces to one another. He has a lot of soft shits, like soft serve ice-cream, vanilla beach days. I frequently have rabbit poops, little dark rocks, a charcoal smudge on the three-ply toilet paper.
