2022 Varuna Fellowships announced
Congratulations to the writers who have been awarded a Varuna Residential Fellowship for 2022.
This year, we received an unprecedented number of applications: 441 submissions, from writers at all stages of their writing lives. Varuna is delighted to announce the 29 Fellowship winners, including six Flagship Fellowship recipients.
Assessment was a highly competitive process. Each applicant’s submission and proposal was read by peer assessors, on the basis of criteria that included both the artistic merit of the work and its potential for further development. All applications were read by at least two assessors, and assessors did not review manuscripts where any potential conflict of interest was identified.
Our Varuna alumni peer assessors were: Peggy Frew, Lee Kofman, Mark O’Flynn, Zoya Patel, Alice Robinson, James Roy and Leni Shilton, with additional, specialist assessment from Meg Vann and Kelly Gardiner.
Thank you to all the writers who submitted their work for consideration this year.
2022 FLAGSHIP FELLOWSHIPS
The Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship is awarded to Katherine Brabon for Body Friend, a work of autofiction. It follows the narrator, a writer and woman who lives with an autoimmune disease, as she navigates practical, psychological and philosophical questions of living in an unwell body.
The Dr Eric Dark Flagship Fellowship is awarded to Lauren Fuge, for her non-fiction narrative work, Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene. Journeying through remote landscapes across the Earth and beyond, Voyagers seeks to understand how human exploration has driven us into the Anthropocene.
The Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship is awarded to Anni Webster-Wright for her hybrid memoir, The Texture of Time. Two women, two rivers, two hundred years: Can we ever step out of time, or does the past always push ahead of us to shape our future?
The Varuna Poetry Flagship Fellowship is awarded to Maddie Godfrey for their work, Dress Rehearsals, a collection of poems written from a non-binary perspective, exploring what it means to wear womanhood into the world when it constitutes both a bullseye and a ball dress.
The Jerra Studio Flagship Fellowship is awarded to Heather Taylor Johnson for her hybrid non-fiction work Dear Vincent, looking at art and illness and the places where they intersect, with Vincent van Gogh as doppelgänger.
The Ray Koppe/ASA Young Writer’s Fellowship is awarded to Sarah Stivens for her work of poetry, Therapeutic Discomfort, a manuscript exploring themes of identity, lived experience of mental illness, grief and relationships.
2022 VARUNA RESIDENTIAL FELLOWSHIPS
Adele Dumont for essay collection, Bezoar
Renee Treml for Breathe, a graphic novel for children
Stephen Carleton for playscript, Brutal Utopias
Liz Evans for Catherine Wheel, a psychological suspense novel
Benjamin Hickey for short story collection, Common Ruin
Rachel Bowen for Young Adult fiction, Hyena Children
Kylie Ladd for I’ll Leave You With This, a work of commercial fiction
Gurmeet Kaur for poetry collection, Instructions on English
Tanya Davies for fantasy or speculative fiction work, Killing Widows
Robyn Cadwallader for historical fiction, Not Less Than Everything
Hugh McGonagle for novel, Peninsula
Rebecca Giggs for narrative non-fiction, PET: The Future of the Animals We Keep
Kelly Gardiner for Young Adult fiction, Roar
Catherine Moffat for crime novel, Snapper Point
Carol Major for novel, The Chinese Woman
Chris Womersley for novel, The Empire
Amanda Curtin for The Longhair Fella, historical fiction
Katia Ariel for memoir, The Swift Dark Tide
Michelle Michau-Crawford for novel, What's Home Supposed to Mean, Anyway?
Sian Campbell for novel, When This is All Over
Bruce Nash for novel, Woman Without a Password
Sonia Orchard for Womankind, creative non-fiction
Jannali Jones for Yenda, Young Adult fiction