ASAL announces pilot fellowship program recipients

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) has announced the recipients of a pilot program of Copyright Agency-funded writers’ fellowships.

Luisa Mitchell and Fiona Murphy are the winners of the two three-month fellowships offered this year.

Mitchell is a Broome-born author with Whadjuk Ballardong Nyungar and European heritage, living and working as an arts producer in Boorloo (Perth). She has short stories published in places such as Portside Review, the Fremantle Press anthology Kimberley Stories and Curtin University’s alumni publication, Curtin Commons. In 2020, she was selected as an Inner-City Writer-in-Residence at Centre for Stories, where she developed a feature screenplay excerpt that was later published in the anthology Under the Paving Stones, the Beach. Mitchell also performs spoken-word poetry and and runs a First Nations Write Night for mob at Centre for Stories, alongside Ballardong editor Casey Mulder.

Murphy is an award-winning writer and accessibility consultant based in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, ABC, the Saturday Paper, Griffith Review and the Big Issue, among many other publications. Her debut memoir, The Shape of Sound (Text), explores her experience with deafness and was highly commended in the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Each ASAL fellowship includes a $3000 honorarium; flights, accommodation and registration at the ASAL annual conference in Melbourne in July 2023; publication of a piece of fiction, nonfiction or poetry in JASAL, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; and a one-year subscription to the Austlit database.

For more information about the pilot fellowship program, see the ASAL website.

Pictured L–R: Mitchell, Murphy.

Category: Awards Local news