International Residency Exchange Announcement
Varuna is delighted to announce that we will be welcoming three international writers to the house later in the year as part of our International Residency Exchange program.
New Zealand writer Gina Cole has been awarded the 2022 Michael King Writers Centre Varuna Residency exchange. Gina will come to Varuna to work on her third book, a novel titled Turukawa Star. This residency is delivered in partnership with Michael King Writers’ Centre (Auckland) and Copyright Licensing New Zealand.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy, award-winning Irish poet and novelist based in Dublin, will join us at Varuna for a four-week residency in the spring of 2022. This residency is delivered in partnership with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan and Poetry Ireland.
Scotland-based author and Cove Park Associate Nicola White has been awarded the 2022 Cove Park and Varuna Residency exchange. This residency is presented in partnership with Cove Park, Scotland, and is generously supported by The Bridge Awards.
Congratulations to these three writers. After two years of international border closures, it is particularly exciting to be once again creating opportunities for our alumni to travel overseas and for international writers to come to Varuna. We look forward to welcoming these writers to Australia and hosting them as part of our Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival.
Varuna’s International Writers Residency Program is funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and we are grateful to these organisations for their generous support.
Gina Cole is of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh descent. She is a freelance writer and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her collection Black Ice Matter won the Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. Her work has been widely anthologised and published in literary journals. She was the inaugural Pasifika curator at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021. She is a qualified lawyer, holds a PhD in creative writing from Massey University and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her second book Na Viro is a science fiction fantasy novel and a work of Pasifikafuturism – this is due to be launched in June/July 2022.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in Co. Limerick and studied at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London. She taught at Waterford Institute of Technology (1977 - 88) and at The Drama Centre, University College Dublin, (1990- 1999).
Her poetry collections include Daughters of the House (2019), The Invisible Threshold (2012), Suntrap (2007), the blue globe (1998), This Hour of the Tide (1994).
Catherine received the eighteenth Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry of the University of St Thomas Center for Irish Studies in April 2014.
Nicola White is the author of three novels.
The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize and was chosen as one of the best debuts of 2014 by Val McDermid.
A prequel to The Rosary Garden, A Famished Heart, was published in 2020 by an imprint of Serpent’s Tail, Viper Books, and The Burning Boy completed the trilogy this year. All three books are set in Ireland in the 1980s.
