Van Neerven receives 2024 Creative Australia Fellowship for literature

Author Ellen van Neerven is the recipient of the 2024 Creative Australia Fellowship for literature, worth $80,000.

Van Neerven’s fellowship ‘will allow for the creation of new work over two years’, said Creative Australia, including ‘finishing a poetry collection (the author’s third) and drafting a novel manuscript (the author’s first)’.

Van Neerven is a writer, editor and literary activist of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage living on the unceded lands of the Yagera and Turrbal people on what is colonially known as north Brisbane. In addition to editing a number of works, they have released four books through the University of Queensland Press (UQP): Heat and Light (2014), Comfort Food (2016), Throat (2020) and Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity (2024).

Among van Neerven’s awards, Heat and Light won the 2013 David Unaipon Award at the Queensland Literary Awards and the Indigenous Writing Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, as well as being shortlisted in the 2015 Stella Prize; Throat won the inaugural UQP Quentin Bryce Award in 2020, and at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Throat was the overall book of the year as well as winning the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Multicultural NSW Award; earlier this year, Personal Score was also awarded the prize for nonfiction at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Creative Australia has this year awarded 10 fellowships within the program, each worth $80,000. The Creative Australia Fellowships ‘support outstanding established artists and arts workers’ activity and professional development for up to two years’. The full list of 2024 recipients is available on the Creative Australia website.

Last year’s recipient of the Creative Australia Fellowship for literature was Alice Pung.

Category: Awards Local news