Cunningham announced as 2026 Dahl fellow

The Board of Eucalypt Australia has announced Sophie Cunningham as a 2026 Dahl fellow for her manuscript “Eucalyptus: A story in twenty trees”.

According to organisers, Cunningham’s work will investigate “how we have come to understand eucalypts, and how that understanding has been shaped – and distorted – by Linnaean systems of classification, settler colonial history, and the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledge systems”.

Cunningham is an author and teacher of creative writing. She is the deputy chair of the Australian Society of Authors and non-executive director of the Copyright Agency, and was a cofounder of The Stella Prize. Among her books are This Devastating Fever (Ultimo, 2022), City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest (Text, 2019).

The Dahl Fellowships honour Bjarne K Dahl, a forest assessor who spent his life working with the eucalypt forests of Victoria. The fellowships aim to “provide an opportunity for talented and deserving Australians to undertake a project related to eucalypts that is not readily fundable elsewhere.”

More information about the fellowship is available on the Eucalypt Australia website.

Photo credit: Fred Kroh.

Category: Awards Local news