Gunaydin named Parramatta’s laureate in literature
Eda Gunaydin has been named the 2025 Parramatta Laureate in Literature.
Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist and fiction writer who grew up in Western Sydney’s Blacktown. Her first essay collection, Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance, won the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Root & Branch “weaves together reflections on growing up in Western Sydney, legacies of migration, intergenerational trauma, and social inequalities across the region”.
As part of the laureate program, Gunaydin will receive a stipend of $50,000 to write a new collection of short stories focusing on Parramatta’s unique geographies and cultural histories. “I am unspeakably excited to develop a suite of interconnected speculative fiction stories,” she said, “rooted in place-based research and inspired by Parramatta’s 2050 vision – to explore how this city and its people might evolve through environmental, social and technological change.”
The laureate program was launched in 2024 by the Sydney Review of Books in partnership with the City of Parramatta and the Writing and Society Research Centre. The organisers see the award as giving “an opportunity to a writer with links to the region to help animate a vision for the future of Parramatta as it cements its position as the true heart of global Sydney.”
Parramatta lord mayor Martin Zaiter said, “Parramatta has a unique community tapestry, one that is diverse and rich in heritage and culture that gives our city an authentic voice. This program gives people from Western Sydney the opportunity to thrive in a creative environment. We support talented writers like Eda Gunaydin to help share the stories of our global city in a unique, compelling way.”
WSRC director Kate Fagan, chair of the selection panel, said, “Literary cultures in the Parramatta region are capturing international attention right now. Gunaydin is an outstanding writer whose work channels the most urgent themes of our time, while placing Parramatta at the forefront of those shared global stories.”
Sydney Review of Books editor James Jiang said, “In Gunaydin, we have a laureate whose creative and critical work is anchored in a powerful civic conscience. Readers can look forward to stories that will bring humour and insight into life in a thriving global city.”
The inaugural laureateship was awarded to Parramatta author Yumna Kassab, whose most recent novel is Politica. Kassab completed the indexical work Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory, which will be published by Giramondo in 2026.
Category: Awards Local news
