Applications close 21 Oct
Six two-week residential fellowships will be offered to writers with disability and/or who are D/deaf.
Tickets on sale now
The Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival returns 31 October - 2 November 2025.
Self-paced online course
Bring the Varuna magic to you with this nine-part online, self-paced course on point of view with Jane Messer. Explore this important element of writing craft, analysing sample readings from well-known authors and being prompted with a series of exercises.
Self-paced online course
Bring the Varuna magic to you with this eight-part online, self-paced course on writing for wellbeing. This revitalising program enables you to explore writing as a practice for your own wellbeing, including techniques for getting started (or re-started!).
Applications now closed
This 8-week online program drills down deeply into how to craft dialogue on the page, ensuring that each of your character’s voices is unique, shaping their distinct speech patterns, and working on questions about who speaks, and when.
Applications now closed
This 10-week course is designed to help you strengthen the fundamentals that aspiring authors often overlook, hone your approach to revising stories for submission, and work towards writing your own knockout short-story collection.
Applications now closed
In this five-week masterclass you’ll have the opportunity to read a lot, write a lot, receive written and verbal feedback, explore a trove of original prompts and diverse forms, explore and enhance aspects of your creative practice and have a one-to-one consultation about your work.
We are delighted to announce the recipient of the 2025 Writing NSW Fellowship.
This week, we were thrilled to attend the awards ceremony for The Whitlam Institute’s What Matters? Writing Competition for young people, to award Claire Heo the Artistic Merit Award for her piece, nestled in the numbers.
The six recipients of the 2025 Arts NT Residential Fellowship have been announced.
The recipients of the 2025 WestWords Varuna Emerging Writers Residency have been announced.
The Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival returns to Katoomba on 31 Oct - 2 Nov 2025 for its fifth year, with a weekend of ideas and creativity featuring Australia’s sharpest minds and most expansive thinkers. Early-bird passes are on sale now.
The six recipients of the 2025 Varuna Climate Fellowship have been announced.
We are taking expressions of interest from Varuna alumni who are interested in joining our Disability and Inclusion Action Group. This is a paid position.
We are delighted to announce the 38 writers who have been awarded a Varuna Residential Fellowship for 2026, having received an unprecedented 541 submissions this year.
A huge congratulations to Varuna alumni Hasib Hourani, for winning the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and James Bradley, for winning the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, at last month's NSW Literary Awards.
The six recipients of the Writer’s Space Online Fellowship for writers with disability have been announced.
We are delighted to announce that award-winning Australian poet Eileen Chong will be travelling to Shanghai this September for a two-month residency.
The recipients of the 2025 Varuna International Exchange New Zealand have been announced.
The twelve recipients of the Copyright Agency First Nations Fellowship for 2025 have been announced.
The Eleanor Dark Foundation is delighted to announce that its application for multi-year funding from Create NSW has been successful, guaranteeing $240,000 in annual funding from 2026 through to 2028.
The six recipients of the Roderick Centre Online Fellowship for Regional and Remote Writers for 2025 have been announced.
