Creative Victoria announces VicArts recipients

Several literary projects and writers have been included among the recipients in the latest round of Creative Victoria’s VicArts Grants.

The program will provide over $1.5 million in funding for 65 creative projects by independent artists and arts organisations in Victoria.

The recipients include:

• Andrew McDonald ($11,995): For ‘Andrina of the Stars’, a children’s novel for readers 7-11 years old exploring science, astronomy and our place in the world.
• Australian Book Review ($39,000): For the 2019 publishing program, including the publication of new work by Victorian writers, the Rising Stars program for younger writers and an Indigenous Fellowship.
• Christopher Gooch ($9630): For ‘Wasteland’, a graphic novel exploring the pursuit of a meaningful life in a broken system.
• David Wadelton ($6000): For ‘Suburban Baroque’, an artist photography book that celebrates the domestic interior designs of Italian and Greek expats living in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1980s.
• Edwina Bartlem ($19,995): For ‘Fantastic Worlds’, an exhibition and public program for families and children that explores the worlds of children’s picture book art.
• Eloise Grills ($19,699): For big beautiful female theory, a graphic memoir exploring bodies, feminism, mental illness, mothers, and daughters, from Colac to Melbourne.
• Emily Bitto ($19,000): For final-stage development of ‘All the Old Symbols’, a poetry collection exploring themes of the human relationship to language and symbol-making.
• Jane B Rawson ($19,500): For a speculative fiction novel about the rise of individualism and authoritarianism in Western democracies from the 1930s to today.
• Myfanwy Jones ($20,000): For ‘The Black Bream’, a contemporary literary fiction novel that explores how a family’s fate intersects with the exploitation of the land, set in and around Tinaroo Dam in Far North Queensland.
• Nicholas Tammens ($19,500): For the presentation of Welfare, a two-day symposium and exhibition on the topic of artists’ welfare.
• Phunktional Ltd ($35,000): For ‘Stories Beneath the Vale’, a community-driven, digital storytelling project, exploring themes of violence and growing up as an Aboriginal woman in country Victoria.
• RMIT on behalf of Michelle Aung Thin ($6155): For ‘Hosina’, a novel for youth that explores the meaning of home and belonging in the context of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people.
• RMIT on behalf of Ronnie Scott ($16,000): For Shirley, a literary novel set in Melbourne’s inner north, exploring real estate independence and queer families.
• Sydney Review of Books ($6000): To commission a series of short essays by four Victorian writers that give diverse accounts of what it is to be a writer in contemporary Victoria.
• The Lifted Brow ($31,424): Support for the Brow Books publishing program in 2019, including the publication of eight new titles by first-time/emerging authors.
• Toby Fehily ($18,100): For ‘It’s Not An Aircraft’, a creative nonfiction manuscript exploring ufology and the nature of truth and belief. The work will focus on the father of Australian ufology’s life and disappearance.
• Un Projects ($70,000): For a two-year program that includes four editions of Un Magazine, new content for the online platform Un Extended, a writer-in-residence program and a series of Un Conversation events.

For more information, and to see all the recipients, see the Creative Vic website.

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Category: Local news