Saunders awarded 2026 Peter Blazey Fellowship

Author and academic Mykaela Saunders has won the $20,000 Peter Blazey Fellowship for her work in progress, “Dear Uncle”.

“Dear Uncle” is about Koori artist Kev Saunders (1956–2012), a Dharug man who “lived a full and fast life,” said organisers. “He was funny, creative and philosophical; he also lived with significant mental health and addiction issues stemming from childhood abuse, poverty, incarceration and losing his first daughter to SIDs. He died young, of lung cancer, aged 55.”

Saunders responds to poems her uncle published with letters and poetry of her own, reflecting on his writing and her memories, their relationship, family stories, community and national history.

Saunders is a Koori and Lebanese writer belonging to the Tweed Goori community. She is the author of Always Will Be (UQP, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She has won the David Unaipon award, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, and the Rosemary van den Berg Prize for First Nations Criticism, among others.

Judges praised Saunders for her “uncompromising, cut-through authorial voice and vision”.

“Saunders’s sentences startle and galvanise,” the panel wrote. “Her work expands the possibilities of life writing in the way it speaks about race, colonialism, family, writing, grief and love.”

The fellowship has been running for more than 20 years and awards $20,000 “to a writer in the nonfiction fields of biography, autobiography, and life writing, to further a work in progress,” said organisers.

Last year’s winner was writer, visual artist, museum worker and community organiser Ju Bavyka for “Just a Hand’s Reach Away – Rukoi Podat”.

Photo credit: Tim Herbert.

Category: Awards Local news