Cultivate mentorship 2026 winners announced
Writing NSW has announced the winners of the 2026 Cultivate Mentorship Program for First Nations and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Emerging Writers.
Developed by Writing NSW to “help build equity and diversity in the writing community”, the annual Cultivate program is open to “emerging NSW-based writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds”.
This year’s winning writers are:
- Jasmine Baker
- Adriana Mucea
- Esther Steenge
- Fale Tumanu
- Bianca Urbina.
They will each work with mentor Huyen Hac Helen Tran, a Vietnamese-Australian writer and arts worker, to prepare a piece of fiction or nonfiction for submission to a journal or anthology.
Tran said that this year’s applications “had an even larger spread of genres than the year previous”.
“A common theme among the pitches were historical fiction works that were either retellings of fairy tales or folklore, or generational family sagas,” said Tran. “Many asked questions on what healing and grief look like in today’s milieu – in relation to difficult family dynamics, displacement, and inherited cultural trauma.”
More information about the program is available on the Writing NSW website.
Category: Awards Local news
