Winners of 2023 Writeability Fellowships
Writers Victoria is excited to announce our 2023 Writeability Fellows. Since 2013, we have recognised outstanding writers with disability annually as part of the Writeability Fellowship Program.
This year, due to funding restraints, we planned for two writers with disability to receive tailored support for their writing project in the form of mentoring, manuscript assessment and/or attendance at Writers Victoria workshops. We are very happy to announce that thanks to the generosity of Writeability alumna, Jessica Walton, we are offering a third fellowship. In offering her services as mentor, Jessica said, “I’m so thrilled to be a mentor for this year’s Writeability Fellowships, as my own experience of being a Writeability Fellow back in 2017 was so positive. It made such a big difference to my confidence as a disabled writer.”
For this year’s Writeability Fellowships we received 39 Entries. As we’ve come to expect, they were extremely varied in genre, style, topic and theme. The judges enjoyed reading Young Adult fiction, poetry, memoir, play scripts, screenplays. non-fiction, fantasy, horror and even Marxist Poetica! The judges would like to congratulate everyone who submitted to the Fellowships. We know it can be challenging to share such personal writing. The applications were of a very high calibre, and the final decisions were difficult. For this reason, we have selected a higher than usual number of Honorable Mentions and Highly Commended awards.
Writeability Fellows, 2023
Grace Hall, for “Off Track”, a young adult novel exploring how physical pain changes a person’s world.
Erin Scudder for “The Idea of California”, a book-length poetry manuscript exploring aesthetic, architectural language as a therapeutic response to trauma and chronic illness.
Texta Queen for “This flower has a spine”, a poetry collection on themes of family dysfunction, childhood alienation, otherness, trauma, grief, and relationships.
Highly Commended
- Tim Loveday for his poetry collection [e]state[ment] exploring “home[lessness] – class [warfare]– art– and love[lessness]”
- Flick Anderson for their untitled experimental fiction exploring memory and time.
- Finnlay Dall for “If the Body Fits”, a pulp sci-fi/horror anthology exploring themes of bodily autonomy
- Thomas Irving for “Hurt People”. A screenplay in development, “Hurt People” is an Australian story about bad love.
- Tayla Richardson for “The String that Goes Unseen”, a poetic memoir exploring fractured memories and the journey from able-bodied child to disabled adult.
Honorary Mentions
- Fredericka Arthur for “The Silver Vixen” a timely novel centring an elderly woman in aged care as protagonist and hero.
- Antonio Baldassi for “Endure” a memoir exploring the desire to be ‘normal’ and the pain and conflict that comes with accepting yourself as disabled.
To read more about this year’s Fellowships, and hear from the judges, and the fellows themselves, go to our Writeability Fellowships page.