Chris Womersley, a fiction and short story author based in Melbourne, will work on The Empire, a novel set in a version of 19th-century Melbourne. Womersley has published six novels, including Bereft in 2011 which won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, Indie Award for Best Fiction and was shortlisted for the ASL Gold Medal for Literature, IMPAC Dublin Award, Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ned Kelly Award for Fiction and The Age Book of the Year.
2023 FELLOW FOR NON-FICTION WRITING
Canberra-based writer, Patrick Mullins, will use the grant to complete a work of narrative non-fiction, A Scandal of Rags and Syrup, exploring legal, political and cultural history and set in Sydney in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mullins has written three books, the most recent The Trials of Portnoy which won the Canberra Critics’ Circle Award in 2020; and Tiberius with a Telephone which won the 2020 National Biography Award and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
2023 FRANK MOORHOUSE FELLOW FOR YOUNG WRITERS
Scott Limbrick is the recipient of the inaugural Copyright Agency Frank Moorhouse Fellowship for Young Writers. Limbrick, from Melbourne, will write the novel, Life in Theory, and will also receive an introduction and mentoring session with Frank Moorhouse’s publishers, Jane Palfreyman and Meredith Curnow. Limbrick was shortlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize for an unpublished manuscript through Hachette Australia and the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and a finalist for the Aurealis Award for Science Fiction Short Story 2022.
2023 READING AUSTRALIA FELLOW FOR TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AND LITERACY
Bridget Forster, Head of Kerferd Library and VCE Literature Teacher at Mentone Girls Grammar, Victoria for her project focusing on using AI generated texts in the English classroom to interrogate the notion of an Australian literary voice.
Her research will explore questions including how teachers can identify cultural bias and ethical issues in the use of AI in the English classroom; and delve into the copyright implications of AI and ask how students can be taught to be ethical users in this new and evolving context.
