2024 International Lamplight (Online) Residency
Thank you to everyone who applied for the 2024 International Lamplight Residency, co-presented with the Irish Writers Centre, and made possible through Creative Australia International Engagement funding.
We are delighted to announce the recipients who will be taking part this year.
Congratulations to:
Australian Writers - Brooke Dunnell, Amanda Curtin, Bernadette Jiwa and Jacinta Halloran.
Irish Writers - Helen Blackhurst, Mia Doring, Sean Mackel and June O Sullivan.
The two-week online lamplight residency program includes a writers conversation with Mary Anne Butler and Conor Kostick, and online Q&A sessions with award-winning authors Elaine Feeney in Ireland and Charlotte Wood in Australia.
We look forward to meeting these writers online in July.
Read the Irish Writers Centre announcement here
Varuna is grateful to the Creative Australia International Engagement funding for support on this project.
AUSTRALIAN WRITERS
Brooke Dunnell is a Boorloo/Perth-based writer whose short fiction has been published widely in journals and anthologies. Her collection of stories, Female(s and) Dogs, was a finalist for the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2020 and shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize in 2021. The unpublished manuscript of her novel The Glass House won the Fogarty Literary Award in 2021 and was published in 2022 by Fremantle Press. Brooke was a recipient of a Westerly Mid-Career Fellowship in 2023 and her latest novel, Last Best Chance, was released in April 2024.
Dr Amanda Curtin is the author of novels Elemental and The Sinkings, short story collection Inherited, and a work of narrative non-fiction, Kathleen O’Connor of Paris. She has also worked in the publishing industry as a book editor for many years. She was awarded the Western Australian Writer’s Fellowship for her current work in progress, a novel set in late nineteenth-century Ireland, Perth and Coolgardie.
Bernadette Jiwa is a leading storytelling advisor, story skills trainer and the author of ten bestselling non-fiction titles. Her debut novel, The Making of Her, was a New York Post Best Book of 2022. Born in Dublin, she now calls Melbourne home.
Jacinta Halloran is a writer, GP and family therapist. She has written four novels: Dissection (Scribe Publications, 2008), shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2007; Pilgramage (Scribe Publications, 2012), shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2014; The Science of Appearances (Scribe Publications, 2016) and Resistance (Text Publishing, 2023). Her short stories have been published in The Pen and the Stethoscope (Scribe, 2010) and New Australian Stories 2.0 (Scribe, 2011). She has also written for The Sunday Age and Inside Story and is a past Board Member of the Stella Prize.
IRISH WRITERS
Helen Blackhurst is the author of Swimming On Dry Land, published by Seren in 2015. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly Literary Magazine and been broadcast on RTE 1 Radio Telefis Eireann as part of the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. Helen facilitates creative writing workshops in a variety of settings, including libraries, writing and education centres. Awards include Arts Council literature bursaries.
Mia Doring is a writer from Dublin. She is the author of the best-selling 2022 memoir Any Girl, a memoir of sexual exploitation and recovery. Her writing has been published in Ropes Literary Journal, Litro Magazine, The Irish Independent, The Sunday Independent, Huffington Post, Irish Country Magazine. The Journal.ie, Fairer Disputations and the Sunday Miscellany Anthology. Her novel baby, girl was one of the twelve books chosen for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. Mia is represented by Honor Spreckley of RCW Literary Agency.
@miachristinagram on Instagram and @Miachristina_ on Twitter
Seán Mackel won the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair in 2013 and in 2017. His work was twice shortlisted for the RTE Short Story Competition and broadcast on national radio. His collection The River was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. The recipient of an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary and Arts Grants from Donegal County Council, Seán was also a former academic based at CSU, NSW, Australia. Currently working on a novel set in 1850s Melbourne, he holds an MA in Creative Writing from Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB. As a disabled writer Seán identifies as an underrepresented artist. https://x.com/MackelSean https://www.instagram.com/sean.g.mackel
June O’Sullivan lives on an island in Co. Kerry. Her writing has appeared in the The Ogham Stone Journal, The York Literary Review, Seaside Gothic, The Storms Journal, The Waxed Lemon and Sonder. She is a student of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. She is represented by Francesca Riccardi of the Kate Nash Literary Agency.
Twitter: @OSulluj79 and Instagram: @sullivanjune
