Hussein named 2025 Kat Muscat Fellow
Express Media and the Kat Muscat Custodial Committee have announced Adalya Nash Hussein as the 10th and final Kat Muscat Fellow.
Selected from a shortlist of three, Hussein is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in publications including Meanjin, Overland and Liminal, and been shortlisted for the Kill Your Darlings Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. She has been the editor of Voiceworks and the Victorian Writer, among other positions, and has edited the zines of young writers from regional Victoria as associate producer of Express Media’s Making Tracks program.
Hussein will use the fellowship to found Loom lit mag, a new national interdisciplinary print and digital literary journal. She said, ‘I am honoured and delighted to have been awarded the 2025 Kat Muscat Fellowship. This fellowship will allow me to establish a new literary publication, alongside collaborators Hasib Hourani, Mira Schlosberg and Selena Repanis. Each of us has been hugely shaped by Voiceworks and Kat’s legacy as one of its most well-regarded editors, and we are honoured to take the ethics, experience and taste we were able to develop to a new publication of our own, where we seek to publish formally and thematically challenging work. A huge thank you to the Kat Muscat Custodial Committee, the Muscat family and Express Media for believing in and supporting this project.’
First awarded in 2016, the Kat Muscat Fellowship was named in honour of the late Voiceworks editor and aims to continue Muscat’s legacy ‘and further develop the future of defiant and empathic young Australian writers and editors’. The fellowship offers professional development up to the value of $5000 for an editorial project or work of writing by a young person aged 16–30 of an underrepresented gender.
Express Media said this will be the final year the fellowship will be awarded in its current structure before it ‘evolves into its next chapter to support young writers and editors via Express Media and its flagship publication Voiceworks’.
Family of Kat Muscat and members of the Kat Muscat Custodial Committee Roz and Maddy Muscat said: ‘We are proud of the fellowship’s contribution to nurturing a generation of talent in Kat’s honour, continuing her legacy in meaningful and profound ways, realised in the literary projects and careers of brilliant young writers and editors. We are excited for the next phase of the fellowship to support the talented young contributors of Voiceworks, who were so important to Kat’s life and work. It is with a deep sense of gratitude that we extend our thanks to the Kat Muscat Custodial Committee for their incredible work and dedication over these past ten years.’
Last year’s fellowship recipient was Xiaole Zhan. More information about the fellowship is available on the Express Media website.
Category: Awards Local news
