Julie Curwin is a psychiatrist, an elite athlete and now she’s the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

Is there anything she isn’t good at? Curwin good-naturedly jabs herself with self-deprecating humor when she did a recent interview.

"I was hoping to receive one of the 25 honourable mentions and when I received the letter, I thought maybe I had done that. Then I read it again and thought, well, maybe I’m the regional winner. I kept reading it — I must have read it eight times before it sunk in that I was the overall winner. Then I thought, for someone who has just won a major literary contest, your reading comprehension isn’t very good!"

Considering she just wrote her first short story in the spring of 2007, Curwin’s accomplishment is astounding. Her third story, World Backwards, came first among 1,700 entries from around the Commonwealth. The story had to be less than 600 words and Curwin says she wrote it mainly as an exercise to see if she could do it.

She came in at 526 well-chosen words and a surprisingly funny ending about an elderly lady accompanying her friend to Italy to spread her friend’s husband’s ashes.

Her success so early in her writing career shouldn’t come as a great surprise; in 2007, she had been selected as a finalist in The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. She hopes to eventually put out a book of short stories, with medical themes and then after that, a novel.

"Or maybe 10 — that’s every writer’s dream though, isn’t it?"

She is inspired by medicine and the people she meets everyday. While she would not base a character on a real person, she says her characters are composites of many people.

"Medicine is a great source of ideas," she says. "You get to know people and you learn what makes people tick. It’s not a bad job for a writer."

Curwin is from Moncton and now lives with her husband Chris Milburn in Sydney, as well as two cats and a dog. A psychiatrist, she has a BA in philosophy and political science from Mount Allison University, a B.Sc. and MD from Dalhousie University, and a diploma in post-graduate medicine (psychiatry) from Queen’s University.

If that wasn’t enough, she has also been one of Canada’s top athletes. She had a 10-year career as a professional long-distance triathlete, and was a member of Canada’s elite national team for long distance running in 2005-2006. Today, she considers herself to be more of a recreational athlete.

Elizabeth Patterson is a writer, broadcaster and musician who lives in Sydney.