Writers Victoria is excited to announce our 2022 Writeability Fellows. Since 2013, thanks to the support of the Grace Marion Wilson Trust, we have recognised outstanding writers with disability annually as part of the Writeability Fellowship Program.
This year five writers with disability will receive tailored support for their writing project in the form of mentoring, manuscript assessment and/or attendance at Writers Victoria workshops, funded by the Grace Marion Wilson Trust.
This year, we received 29 applications for Writeability Fellowships. Entries were extremely varied in genre and style, including literary fiction, poetry, young adult fiction, non-fiction, fantasy and memoir. The applications showed a high standard of writing, and judge Clem Bastow said:
“It was such an honour to help judge the 2022 Writeability Fellowship entries, which showed such an exciting breadth of genres and forms. They are a testament to the diversity and importance of #OwnVoices when writing about disability but also, all the entries remind the reader that writers with disability bring such unique voices to Australian literature. That powerful positionality was clear in every piece, regardless of subject, and it was a real treat to read work that will no doubt be the first of many for this talented group of writers.”
This year’s Grace Marion Wilson Writeability Fellows are:
- Dorian Sutton for The Passenger, a young adult, queer coming-of-age story about a teen growing up in the suburban sprawl of Melbourne in the late 1990s.
- Emma Rennison for No Guts, No Glory, a dystopian fiction about a primetime TV game show that awards surgeries as prizes to winning contestants after the UK healthcare system collapses.
- Juliet Sironi for &, a non-linear memoir exploring depression and trauma after severe memory loss and amnesia.
- Maggie Scott for The Bottle Factory, a story where a woman, grieving the death of her grandmother, is drawn into the music world by her estranged father, a producer facing sex allegations.
- Sarah Stivens for Therapeutic Discomfort, a poetry collection that explores themes of identity, lived experience of disability and mental illness, grief and relationships.
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.
We encourage all applicants to continue to develop their writing projects, and to keep seeking opportunities for development and support. Writeability aims to remove some of the barriers that prevent people with disability from connecting with writing and publishing, and to support them to develop their skills and writing careers.
For more information about Writeability, see here.