2022 Queensland Writers Centre Varuna Fellowship Recipients
In exciting news, we can now announce the recipients of the Queensland Writers Centre Varuna Fellowships. Both authors will receive a two-week residency at Varuna, The National Writers' House in 2022, allowing dedicated time to write in a famous home of Australian writing.
Special thanks to this year’s judging panel for the Fellowships: Madonna Duffy from University of Queensland Press, author and academic Dr Rohan Wilson (QUT), and academic and neurodivergent author Dr Anna Whateley.
Varuna’s own annual residential fellowships will open for applications in June. To find out more, visit varuna.com.au/fellowships.
Balli Jaswal
Queensland Writers Centre Underrepresented Writers Fellowship
Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of four novels, including Singapore Literature Prize finalist Sugarbread, and the international bestsellers Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows and The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. Her debut novel Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist award. Jaswal's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan.com, Harper's Bazaar India and Salon.com, among other publications. Jaswal has held residencies at the University of East Anglia and Nanyang Technological University, where she completed her PhD on contemporary writing about women in the South Asian diaspora. She is preparing for the 2023 release of her upcoming novel, Now You See Us.
Richard Yaxley
Queensland Writers Centre Established Writers Fellowship
Richard Yaxley is a Brisbane-based author. His novels include The Rose Leopard (UQP 2003), Joyous and Moonbeam (Scholastic 2013) and This Is My Song (winner of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Literature; winner of the 2019 ACU Book of the Year Award; finalist in the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards). The Happiness Quest was published by Scholastic in 2018 and listed as a 2019 CBCA Notable for Older Readers. Recent novels include A New Kind Of Everything (Scholastic 2020) and Harmony (Scholastic 2021), which was longlisted for the Children’s and Young Adult section of the ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Richard is also a past winner of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (Drink the Air, 2010), the Walter Stone Life-writing Award (2016) and a Fellowship from the May Gibbs Literature Trust (2016). He is an ambassador for Australia Reads and was a judge for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2021.
He has two Masters Degrees, in Cultural Studies and Human Rights, and has written or co-written over twenty-five textbooks for classrooms across Australia, as well as plays and poetry. In 2011, he was awarded a Medal in the Order of Australia (OAM).
Queensland Writers Centre offered its first annual Varuna Fellowships to our members in 2022. For more information about the Fellowships and other Queensland Writers Centre residencies, visit www.queenslandwriters.org.au/residencies.
Express your interest in next year’s Fellowship offerings at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/eoi
