A 34-year-old creative writing teacher has captured Australia’s $20,000 Vogel Prize for a “gritty tale of drugs, despair and teenage runaways is set in a truck stop in the Central West of [the Australian state of New South Wales] where the teenage protagonist fries chips, fills the Coke fridge and pie-warmer and hides from the law.” Julienne van Loon lives in Perth these days, but grew up in the bush town where her story, which took nearly a decade to write, is set.