Writers Victoria announces Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund recipients

Writers Victoria has announced the fourth round of recipients for the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund.

Twelve successful writers, booksellers and publishers were selected from 111 applicants to receive a total of $49,569.

The recipients are:

• Oliver Reeson ($5418): writer attending the Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon
• Sista Zai Zanda ($6585): storyteller and curator going to South Africa for cultural immersion in the contemporary writing, performance and literary scene
• Heather Dyer ($4000): bookseller attending the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Baltimore, Maryland
• Melanie Joosten ($4805): writer visiting the suffragette archives housed at the Women’s Library in London, as research for her third novel
• Yvette Holt ($2457): poet and academic attending the Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival in Melbourne
• Cher Tan ($5733): writer travelling to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia for research to develop an experimental nonfiction essay collection
• Susie Anderson ($4000): writer travelling to Canada and within Australia for research that will support an essay collection on contemporary Aboriginal female artists
• Annabel Brady-Brown ($2167): editor and publisher attending Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair and Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference in New York City
• Fiona Murphy ($5560): writer researching her memoir in the world’s first DeafSpace, at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC
• Sara Mansour ($4100): performance poet attending the Rhodes Poetry Retreat in Greece
• Alison Whittaker ($2015): writer attending the Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival in Melbourne
• Ellen O’Brien ($2730): poet and creative facilitator attending the Acts of Listening Lab at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal, Quebec.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, in 2017 Writers Victoria announced the travel fund, named in honour of poet and writer Neilma Sidney, to award grants of between $2000 and $10,000 to writers and literary sector workers to ‘undertake strategic travel opportunities for the benefit of their own writing practice or career development, or for the broader Australian literary sector’.

For more information, visit the Writers Victoria website.

Category: Local news