Tag Archives: news

Meniscus (Volume 13, Issue 1)

The new issue of Meniscus is crammed with poems and short stories and flash fiction, all of them reflecting the imaginations, voices and observations of writers who are doing what writers do: translating the world into text. The writers published here hail from across the globe: from the Americas, the UK and Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. They hold various identities, bring various levels of prior experience in writing, and work their genres in a multitude of ways. This stunning range of experiences and contexts mean they produce a kaleidoscopic swirl through the possibilities of language, the multiplicities of ways of telling, and the performativity enabled by creative writing, thinking and practice.

Read the latest edition via the Meniscus website here.

Closing Soon: AAWP 2025 Annual Conference Call for Abstracts

Movement & Stasis: 30th Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference

University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3 – 5 December 2025

This year’s conference is on the theme of Movement and Stasis. We invite abstracts for conference presentations of 15 or 20 minutes in duration and pre-formed collaborative discussion panels (three to four panellists only) that reflect consideration of movement and stasis. We encourage any or all modes of presentation.

We welcome the submission of abstracts relevant to the creative writing discipline, on creative and professional writing practices and processes, research in creative writing, the teaching of writing and related issues.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 30 May 2025.

For more information and submission guidelines visit the AAWP website here.

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) April 2025 edition

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) includes scholarly contributors from Australia, New Zealand and the United States: Carrie Tiffany reflects on the mechanical intertext in relation to her award-winning novel Exploded View; Lilian Roberts explores Nachträglichkeit in poetic autobiography; Anders Villani contributes new thinking on trauma and poetics in Kate Lilley’s Tilt and his own collection, Totality; Patricia Webb discusses the inclusion of social justice themed texts in writing courses; Annabel Wilson reads for re-arrangement in Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away; Ruth Jackson writes on walking and travel writing in Ethiopia; Marija Pericic looks at sumazdat reading practices within the Soviet Union (USSR); Shelley-Anne Smith considers emotional contagion and embodied empathy in literary posthumanism; and Soren Tai Smith writes on self-shedding and decreativity in Kafka and Weil.

This issue also includes prose and poetry by Caitlyn Stone, Jacqueline Exbroyat (trans. Patricia Worth), Brid-Áine Parnell, Ian C. Smith, David Thomas Henrey Wright, Nat Kassel, Inez Baranay, Yuxin Zhao, Rebekah Clarkson, Shady Cosgrove, Gay Lynch, Julia Prendergast, Billie Travalini, Cassandra Atherton, Dominique Hecq, Jen Webb, Katrina Finlayson, Eugen Bacon, Paul Hetherington, Owen Bullock, Jessie Seymour, Martin Langford, Annabel Wilson, Verity Oswin, Beth Spencer, Ella Jeffrey, and Les Wicks.

And in our reviews section, Samuel J. Cox reviews Contemporary Preoccupations in the Australian Novel by Nicholas Burns and Louise Klee (eds.), Tarla Klamer reviews Leaf by Anne Elvey & Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas, Andrew Leggett reivews Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, Philip Harvey reviews Lands of Likeness & Dark-Land by Kevin Hart, Jake Sandtner reviews Juice by Tim Winton, Jodi Vial reviews Flight by Shady Cosgrove, Colin Dray reviews A to Z of Creative Writing Methods by Deborah Wardle et al. (eds.), Amanda Tink reviews Raging Grace by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottoway and Kerri Shying (eds.), Denise Beckton reviews Thinning by Inga Simpson & Something About Alaska by JA Cooper, Moya Costello reviews The Season by Helen Garner, Carolyn Booth reviews Images of Water by Eugen Bacon (ed.), Jen Webb reviews Mishearing by David Musgrave and we publish a letter to the editors from James Shea and Grant Caldwell in response to Owen Bullock’s review of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (TEXT Vol 28, No 2).

Read this and other issues via the TEXT website here.

2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize

The $150,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize is open for submissions in two categories – Adult and Children &Young (CYA) Adult. $100,000 will be awarded to the Adult category winner, with an additional $5,000 awarded to each of the remaining two shortlisted authors. In the CYA category, the winner receives $30,000, while the two short listers receives $5,000 each.

The prize is open to authors who are citizens or residents of Australia and New Zealand. Novels must have been first published between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025.

Submissions close 11 June 2025 5pm AEDT.

Learn more via the Historical Novel Society Australasia website here.

2026 National Library of Australia Fellowships

Open to researchers in various fields and disciplines, these fellowships offer financial and research support for residencies at the National Library. Providing extended access to Australia’s largest cultural collection, National Library Fellowships foster research that produces new knowledge to shape Australia’s intellectual landscape and contributes to public understanding of our collections.

The Library’s Fellowships offer experienced researchers an opportunity to undertake deep and sustained research at the National Library using the Library’s collections.

Fellowships are available to researchers who require onsite access to the Library’s uniquely held or extensive collections to advance their research towards publication or other public outcomes.

Applicants may work in any field or discipline where the Library’s collections have appropriate depth and breadth to support the desired outcomes.

Applications for National Library of Australia Fellowships and the Creative Arts Fellowship will close on Monday 5 May 2025.

Learn more via the National Library of Australia website here.

2025 Writers on the Reef Residency

The Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing at James Cook University is pleased to invite applications for its 2025 Writers on the Reef Residency.

The residency is open to published or emerging writers who have a current project to work on during their stay.

From the 13-20 August, 2025, 5 writers will be in residence at beautiful waterfront beach house in Horseshoe Bay, Magnetic Island.

This year’s residency invites writers of any genre with environmental themes, including but not limited to writing on nature, conservation, islands, oceans, beaches, Sea Country, ecosystems, sustainability, and island communities—or which may resonate in particular with Magnetic Island and its natural, social, or cultural history and habitat.

Applications close 2 May 2025.

Learn more via the JCU website here.

Don Bank Museum Writer in Residence Program

Writers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoir and plays who are from Metropolitan Sydney are invited to apply for this unique opportunity to pursue their inspiration in the tranquil and historic Don Bank Museum whilst contributing to the cultural life of the local community.

This program aims to support writers at all stages of their career.

The successful candidate will benefit from a special one-hour consultation with a publisher from Penguin Random House, networking with the local writing community and Council’s Arts and Events initiaitives, and more.

Applications close Monday 14 April 2025.

Learn more via the North Sydney Council website here.

AAALS Creative Writing Competition

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS), together with the American Australian Association, welcomes submissions to our annual creative writing competition between 1-31 March 2025.

The competition invites entries in the following categories:

· Poetry

· Creative Prose

· Indigenous Writers Poetry

· Indigenous Writers Creative Prose

With the generous support of the American Australian Association, the value of these prizes has been increased. The winner of each prize will now be awarded US$1000, plus publication in the journal Antipodes.

Further details are available here: https://aaals.org/antipodes/, with submissions accepted through the Antipodes portal during March 2025: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/submission_guidelines.html.

The Writer’s Way: A Writer’s (Re)treat to (Re)discover the Joy of Writing

The Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP)* is delighted to announce a new collaboration with The Writer’s Way retreats – immersive experiences designed to (re)connect writers with creativity, presence, and purpose.

Set in the spectacular Blackall Range of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland, The Writer’s Way welcomes writers of all backgrounds – creative, academic, and professional – to a retreat founded in mindfulness, not as theory, but as practice.

At The Writer’s Way retreats, you’ll explore meditative, contemplative, and reflective practices intended to deepen your connection to yourself as a writer, refine your creative process, and potentially, elevate the quality of your work. Whether you’re seeking a physical escape, a mental reset, or a spiritual (re)treat to strengthen your sense of purpose, The Writer’s Way provides a perfect setting, a tranquil space to (re)discover the joy of writing.

With limited places available, the next retreat runs 29 May – 1 June 2025.

For details and bookings: https://thewritersway.com.au.

*Special Offer: AAWP members who are Higher Degree Research (HDR) students or Early Career Researchers (ECRs) can apply for a special accommodation rate.

Call for book chapters–Pasts Imagined: Creative Methods in Knowledge Production about History, Memory and Culture

Creative methods are increasingly considered a source for new knowledge production, while the past has increasingly become a site of fascination and nostalgia for contemporary audiences and scholars alike. The popularity of media such as TV including Empress Ki (2013), Stranger Things (2016), Bridgerton (2020), Oppenheimer (2023), novels like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (2011) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and podcasts like The Rest is History (2021—) demonstrate a hunger for representations of an imagined past. The past has also become highly politicised: it may seem like a safe haven in times when the future seems blighted by climate crisis, war and illness, while nationalists use an imagined golden age to justify conservatism and violence.

Yet, historical revisionism might also offer a way of giving voice to marginalised perspectives at the intersections of gender, sex, race, ability, sexuality, religion and embodiment. What, then, does this mean for contemporary artists, arts-workers and communities to return, revise or intervene in narratives about the past? In what ways can techniques like fictionalisation and anachronism draw attention to the links between past, present and future? What are the ethics and methodological responsibilities of representing the past in multiple media? In what ways can other versions of the past disrupt dominant knowledge systems and power structures?

Proposed chapters should interrogate these questions with examples across the creative arts, media, cultural studies and museum and gallery studies. Chapters should focus on examples drawn from creative practice and/or creative works or exhibitions. We are particularly interested in chapter proposals that problematise acts of construction, invention and anachronism and understand the epistemological value of such work.

Book editors: Ariella Van Luyn, Alina Kozlovski, Chris Muller

Title and 250-300 word abstracts for chapters of 5000-6000 words due: 3 March 2025

Please submit to avanluyn@une.edu.au

Book proposal developed and submitted: mid 2025

Developed chapters due: End 2025