Featured Writers

Fiona Murphy on Structure and Memoir: A Writer’s Process

Fiona Murphy is an award-winning deaf poet and essayist based in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Age, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, The Big Issue, among many other publications. Her debut memoir, The Shape of Sound, was released by Text Publishing in March 2021. …

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Emily Bitto on ‘Wild Abandon’

Emily Bitto is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Her debut novel, ‘The Strays’, was the winner of the 2015 Stella Prize. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in various publications, and she has been teaching creative writing for over a decade. Her second novel ‘Wild Abandon’ was published to acclaim in …

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The Good, the Bad and the Surprising: Reflections on Mentoring in a Writability Fellowship

Tim Williams was a 2020 Writeability Fellow, and worked from Melbourne with mentor Tim Hobart in New South Wales on his screenplay ‘Splint’. Fulfilling fellowships remotely was a particular challenge for our fellows, who took part in workshops and received manuscript assessments, as well as working with mentors on their projects. In this Q&A with …

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Heidi Everett on Own Voices, Rewriting ‘Normal’ and ‘My Friend Fox’

Heidi Everett is an artist, creative workshop facilitator, mental health recovery advocate, social impact facilitator, and projects and events innovator in Melbourne, Australia. ‘My Friend Fox’ is her first book.  Heidi spoke with our Interim Writeability Program Manager, Jess Obersby, about her incredible new debut ‘My Friend Fox’ and all things writing neurodiversity.   I know you’ve …

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Amal Awad on Romance, Women’s Fiction and Writing Complex Characters

Amal Awad is a journalist, screenwriter, author and performer. She is the author of ‘Courting Samira’, ‘This Is How You Get Better’ and ‘The Things We See in the Light’ as well as the non-fiction books ‘The Incidental Muslim’, ‘Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women’, ‘Fridays with My Folks: Stories on Ageing’, ‘Illness and Life’, and …

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Expert Advice

While my theatre career hangs out to dry like washing on a line in a gusty Melbourne wind, I look to my lockdown to-do list. First: get the jab. Mass vaccination hubs are opening up for my age group, so I book in for Friday. A week away. What to do until then? Luckily, the …

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Simon Rowell’s journey from self-publishing to a book deal with Text Publishing

I’ll start at the beginning, but will not linger there long. When I was around fourteen, buoyed by a sense of grandiosity fed by a healthy dose of hormones, I decided I wanted to be a writer. A beret-wearing, hipster-before-there-were-hipsters type of writer. What genre or style I couldn’t say, which should tell you that …

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Ingrid Laguna on leading an inspired writing life

Ingrid Laguna is the Education Advisor for the Melbourne Writers Festival and the author of four books – a memoir and three novels for young readers. ‘Songbird’ was given Notable recognition by the CBCA and shortlisted for Speech Pathology Australia’s Book of the Year Award. ‘Bailey Finch Takes a Stand’ is her latest release. Ingrid …

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Making Sense of a Life

The following was published in the March – May 2021 edition of The Victorian Writer: Wordsmith. Dr Kate Forsyth is an award-winning author for both adults and children. Her work has been translated into twenty languages.  

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