Information, inspiration and insights into the writing life
For this year’s International Day of People with Disability, Write-ability is featuring two very different storytellers, memoirist and 2019 Write-ability Fellow MJ McArthur and graphic artist Matt Robertson, one of the winners of this year’s Dulcie Stone Writing Awards.
For this year’s International Day of People with Disability, Write-ability is featuring two very different storytellers, memoirist and 2019 Write-ability Fellow MJ McArthur and graphic artist Matt Robertson, one of the winners of this year’s Dulcie Stone Writing Awards.
Andy Jackson is an award-winning poet and performer who writes about bodily difference. He lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, and his poetry has been published in many literary journals. He has performed in several festivals, including the Brisbane Writers Festival, Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai, India, Newcastle Young Writers Festival and Overload Poetry Festival, among others. Andy, who has also worked in cafes and libraries, has been a resident at Writers Victoria, the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and Asialink.
Writers Victoria, with the support of The Myer Foundation, is delighted to announce the recipients of Round 5 of the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund.
We received 99 applications, requesting a total of $540,191 in grant money. This round's judges were writer Eugen Bacon, publisher Kirstie Innes-Will from Black Inc., and podcaster Astrid Edwards. They were impressed with the overall quality of the applications in what was a competitive round, awarding a total of $50,335 to 11 recipients across 10 grants.
When Leone Purdy of the Sale Write-ability writers group decided to self-publish her poetry book, not everything went to plan.
I was elated. My first book published – and it was lovely. I felt pride in myself; a feeling that was new to me. Was this beautiful, softcover, book of quirky, idiosyncratic poems really mine? Working with a publishing service had all seemed so easy. I’d paid them to edit and review my manuscript. Where once it had been a jumbled mash of incoherent, long-winded and unrhythmical verse, it was now a polished poetry book.
Christos is the author of six books, including Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On (Ana Kokkinos, 1998). His second novel, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. For The Slap, his third book, he won Overall Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.
We asked Australia’s top authors, poets and illustrators – nominees for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – why they chose their career, and their responses are as varied as their creations.
Meredith Lake, The Bible in Australia (Australian History):
Well, I became an historian – and found that it’s all about stories. But I’ve always loved reading, and even as a kid I was often making things with words.
We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2019 Deborah Cass Writing Prize.
After winning the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition in 2014, Else volunteered at Writers Victoria, worked at the Emerging Writers Festival and studied creative writing at RMIT. Else has been published widely, including Visible Ink, Australian Book Review, The Suburban Review and Offset. Her fiction has won or been shortlisted for awards such as the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards, the Fair Australia Prize, the VU Overland Short Story Prize and the Margaret River Short Story Competition.
