Writers Victoria announces 2023 Writeability fellows

Writers Victoria has announced the 2023 Writeability fellowship recipients.

This year’s recipients are:

• Grace Hall for ‘Off Track’, ‘a young adult novel exploring how physical pain changes a person’s world’
• Erin Scudder for ‘The Idea of California’, ‘a book-length poetry manuscript exploring aesthetic, architectural language as a therapeutic response to trauma and chronic illness’
• Texta Queen for ‘This flower has a spine’, ‘a poetry collection on themes of family dysfunction, childhood alienation, otherness, trauma, grief, and relationships’.

Highly commended writers were Flick Anderson, Finnlay Dall, Thomas Irving, Tim Loveday and Tayla Richardson, while Fredericka Arthur and Antonio Baldassi received honorary mentions.

The annual fellowships, which ‘support emerging writers with disability with tailored professional development support such as manuscript assessments, curated programs of workshops, and/or mentoring’, have run since 2013, with the support of the Grace Marion Wilson Trust. The broader Writeability program ‘aims to remove some of the barriers that have traditionally prevented people with disability from connecting with writing and publishing’.

In a website post announcing this year’s recipients, Writers Victoria said that funding constraints had originally meant that it planned to award two fellowships this year, but program alumnus Jessica Walton offered mentoring services for the program, enabling a third fellowship for 2023. Recipients were selected from 39 applications.

More information about the fellowships is available on Writers Victoria’s website.

Category: Awards Local news