First FALS writing residency announces attendees

Claire Corbett writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her first novel, When We Have Wings (Allen &Unwin), was shortlisted for the 2012 Barbara Jefferis Award and shortlisted for the 2012 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and published overseas.  Watch Over Me, her second novel, was published by A&U in 2017. She teaches Creative Writing at UTS, is Deputy Chair of the Board of Varuna, the National Writers’ House, and is fiction editor of Overland literary Journal. This year she has also been awarded a Lockie Fellowship by the University of Melbourne for her third novel, The Aquarium.

Claire is especially excited about the Writing at the Reef residency because the subject matter of The Aquarium is vitally concerned with the state of the oceans. Being at the research station and learning from the marine scientists there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to breathe this research and knowledge about the oceans and particularly the Reef into the book. She aims to redraft the book while on the residency.

Stacy is an illustrator, radio presenter and comics maker living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri people in Victoria. His comic works have appeared across ABC platforms as well as in comics anthologies by kuš! and Fantagraphics. He is currently working on his debut graphic novel.

I hope to have time to draw directly from nature and take a rare week to focus solely on the writing of my first graphic novel. It's going to be a long and difficult process so I'm excited to be around other writers with so much experience. I also fear that I will annoy the scientists so much with my questions that they won't want to open it up again.

Eliza is an author and PhD candidate at Deakin University. She has published four novels, which have been shortlisted for awards such as the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, QLD Literary Awards and NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Her articles, essays and short fiction have been published widely and her fifth novel, Salt and Skin will be out in August with Ultimo Press. She lives on a flower farm in Wurundjeri Country.

During the residency I'll be researching and working on a new novel that draws on oceanic folklore to examine the critical intersection of place, humanity and climate change. Witnessing the cutting edge research being undertaken at the AIMS facility as well as immersing myself in the surrounding environment will be absolutely invaluable.

Jock Serong is the author of five novels across multiple genres. He is the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly and a longstanding senior features writer for Surfing World magazine. His work also appears in The Monthly, The Guardian and other major media. Jock currently serves on the board of The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.

I hope to interrupt and interrogate as many scientists as I can, to learn more about our tropical seas, about the reef and about what we are doing to understand the human effects upon it.

Maria Takolander is a prize-winning fiction writer and poet. Her most recent book of poems, Trigger Warning (UQP), won the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her short-story collection, The Double (Text), was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2015. Her words can also be found in bronze plaques in the Geelong CBD and at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.

I am working on a dystopian climate-change novel partly set on Australia’s northern coast. A key question for me is: what will the Great Barrier Reef look like, and how will its forms of life function in a climate-changed future? It is a question I hope to have answered during my residency.

Jessica White is the award-winning author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud. Jessica has received funding from Arts Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts and has undertaken residencies in Australia, Italy and Germany. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia.

On the residency, Jessica will be working on her novel about climate change, sea creatures, love and adaptation.