ASAL 2026 fellows announced

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) has announced its two writers’ fellowships for 2026 in association with the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. This year’s fellows are:

• Western Australian writer Emily Tsokos Purtillx, whose short fiction has been published in Griffith Review, Westerly and Science Write Now. She was a 2024 winner of the Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition for her essay, Know Thyself, and her debut multigenerational Greek-Australian novel Matia (UWA Publishing, 2024) won the 2025 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for an Emerging Writer.
• Regional NSW writer Shannon Benton, whose work explores memory, place and creative identity, often drawing on Australian literary history and landscape. She was shortlisted for the Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Emerging Writers Prize and The Best Australian Yarn, and her work has been published in Mona Magazine. Benton is developing her novel Fragmented, a work of literary fiction set between Victoria’s Mulberry Hill and Hanging Rock.

ASAL fellows are awarded to published authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama or children’s/YA. Preference is given to writers who are living and working in areas outside the eastern seaboard and/or in non-metropolitan areas. Applications from First Nations writers and writers from diverse backgrounds are encouraged.

Each three-month fellowship includes a $3000 honorarium; flights, accommodation, and registration at the ASAL annual conference in July 2026; the opportunity to use ASAL’s social media accounts to raise the profile of their writing and that of other writers in their state/territory/First Nations Country; a profile on the ASAL website; publication of a piece of fiction, nonfiction or poetry in JASAL, the journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; and a year’s subscription to the Austlit database.

Last year’s fellows were Izzy Roberts-Orr and Eda Gunaydin.

Category: Awards Local news