Nada Kirkwood, outgoing Committee of Management (CoM) member, reflects on the experience on being on the CoM, and offers advice to those intending to nominate ahead of this year's AGM.
News

Writers Victoria is delighted to announce Melbourne-based writer Nancy Langham-Hooper as the recipient of the first Only Connect Digital Writer Residency for Carers for 2019.
Nancy has lived in the USA, UK and Australia and holds a PhD in art history. She is the primary carer for a child with a disability.

Welcome to our monthly brag about our Writers Victoria community members who have won awards, been shortlisted or longlisted for writing prizes or received industry recognition.
Collective Celebrations
Margaret River Press has announced the shortlist for the 2019 Margaret River Short Story Competition. Among the shortlist are:

Eight Australian writers have been shortlisted for the 2019 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship worth $15,000.
The Fellowship, now in its eighth year, has attracted a field of high-quality proposals from biographers across Australia.
“I’m so encouraged by the range and quality of the proposals we received,” said Della Rowley, sister of biographer Hazel Rowley. “Hazel would have been impressed and excited to read about these fascinating subjects.”

Australians with disability are invited to submit their work to ‘Growing Up Disabled in Australia’, to be published by Black Inc. in April 2020.

It’s 3pm; scorching. I am in El Bruc, a village 50km outside of the Barcelona city centre and home to around 2000 Catalonians; an expanse of blue sky and a colony of self-possessed street cats. I photograph the ubiquitous independence ribbons and freshly spray-painted lettering on a rendered brick wall: Valtónyc. 3.5 anys de preso per cantar mort al borbo (3.5 years in prison for singing death to the Borbon monarchy).

Migrant Writing Growing Strong
Jonathan Green to present 2018 Deborah Cass Prize
The fourth annual Deborah Cass Prize for Writing, which goes to unpublished migrant writers, will be presented by literary editor and journalist Jonathan Green, on Wednesday 5 December.
The Prize received 91 entries from around Australia in 2018. The judges Christos Tsiolkas, Nyadol Nyuon and Tony Ayres will choose the winner from a shortlist of nine entries:

The Inner Gippsland Write-ability Goes Regional and Online Writing Group recently finished its eight-month run under the program. Write-ability Project Assistant Alex Fairhill joined the group in Moe to celebrate the participants’ work, and hear about plans for the group to continue.

Round 3 of the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund received 112 applications, requesting a total of $591,306.34 in grant money.
This round's judges were Emily Booth from Text Publishing, Indra Kurzeme from State Library of Victoria and author Eli Glasman. They were thrilled with the quality of the overall applications and awarded $48,288 to 9 applicants.

Ahead of her Disability Binaries in Writing workshop, presented as part of the Write-ability program, Micheline Lee spoke to Katy Hocking about overcoming fears and biases – both internal and external.