Writers Victoria

Open date: 9am (AEST), Saturday 1 October 2023. 

Close date: 5pm (AEDT), Wednesday 16 November 2023.   

Applications are now open for the 2024 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.    

Now in its thirteenth year, the Fellowship commemorates the life, ideas and writing of Hazel Rowley (1951–2011) and awards $20,000 to an emerging or established Australian writer to support research and development of a new biographical or autobiographical work.   The Fellowship is open to Australian writers of biography and memoir, but can also extend to include a writer working on an aspect of cultural or social history. It may be used to fund research or travel, to develop a new proposal, or to progress a manuscript for submission to potential publishers.   Judges will be looking for applicants who demonstrate excellence in the quality of their work, courage in their choice of project, and a passionate engagement with the world of ideas and the way that people live their lives. The subject of the biography needs to be someone who made a demonstrable contribution to society.    

Applications close at 5pm (AEDT) on Wednesday 16 November 2023.     

TERMS AND CONDITIONS 

1. Applicants must be over 18 years of age.
2. Applicants must be Australian citizens (living anywhere) or permanent residents and write in English.
3. The Fellowship will not cover tuition fees, professional editing, research assistant salary, PhD research or publishing subsidy.
4. Projects must be works of non-fiction biography or memoir (rather than biographical fiction).
5. Where relevant, the work must comply with the Australia Council Protocols for Producing Indigenous Australian Writing.
6. Those shortlisted will be notified in January and the recipient will be notified in February before the public announcement in March.
7. The successful applicant will enter into an agreement to be negotiated with Writers Victoria and the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund Advisory Committee. The agreement will cover the project timeline, payment schedule and reporting requirements.
8. The Fellowship must be commenced and expended within 12 months of receipt of funds. 
9. All Fellowship recipients travelling in 2024-25 must agree to comply with public health restrictions before, during and following travel.
10. The Fellowship recipient will be required to complete an artistic and financial report (acquittal) halfway through and at the completion of the project.
11. The Fellowship will be acknowledged in any publication resulting from the work supported during the Fellowship.
12. The Fellowship recipient will be asked to provide three copies of any subsequently published biography or work to the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund Advisory Committee.
13. The judges’ decision will be final. No correspondence will be entered into.

  For more information, please email Jennifer at jennifer@writersvictoria.org.au.

The Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship is supported by the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund; a sub-fund of Australian Communities Foundation.

1. Each successful applicant will – 

· meet with the Writeability Program Manager to create their professional development plan. This meeting can take face-to-face or via telephone or teleconferencing e.g. Skype, Zoom.

· keep a journal which reflects on their fellowship process; and

· provide a photograph and short biography for publicity purposes. As part of the Fellowship, extracts from successful applicants’ work may be published in The Victorian Writer magazine or the Writers Victoria website.

2. Writers Victoria will meet access requirements for all agreed Writeability Fellowship activities. 

3. Fellowships can be completed either in person or online depending on the access requirements of the recipient. 

4. There will be no financial payment to Fellowship recipients.

5. Previous Writeability Fellows are not eligible to apply.

6. Fellowships will be offered on the relative strengths of each application. Successful applications will include a clear and engaging description of the project, a proposal for support that is relevant and achievable, and a writing sample that is high quality or shows great promise.

7. This is a competitive process. We expect there to be many applications, and, due to funding constraints this year, we only have 2 fellowships to award. All applicants will have the opportunity for feedback if requested. 

8. Due to unavoidable delays in confirming funding this year, the 2023 Fellowships will be confirmed in late November 2023, and professional development activities for fellows will take place between February and July 2024.

9. How to apply

To apply, please complete and return the following by, 4pm AEDT Monday 30 October 2023

• Application form 
• A sample of your writing from your planned Writeability Fellowship project (maximum 1,000 words).

Pitch to the Liminal Review of Books

   When we launched The Liminal Review of Books in late 2021, we asked: if, historically, literary prizes had been disproportionately awarded to white writers, then which systems, cultural practices, and/or racialised supremacies have allowed, nurtured and established these biases? In her introduction to the series, editor Leah Jing McIntosh wrote that literary criticism and literary critics would surely be implicated. The Liminal Review of Books, then, is our critical intervention into the literary landscape.
   Since launching, we have worked with writers of colour and Indigenous writers in so-called Australia to produce thrilling works of literary criticism. 'To reach back into your bookshelves, to chase a mood' — that was more or less the only prompt we provided. And the mood has been varied, yet fierce and incisive nonetheless. We have published formalist engagements, psychoanalytic and sociological ones, our critics writing into and against the field. Reviews have taken the usual objects of criticism, yet also span more playful treatments: on a reality TV show, thinking about reading but not-reading, a consideration of where experimental nonfiction by writers of colour may belong. 

And it is here that we are widening our scope. For the next iteration of the Liminal Review of Books, we are seeking pitches for the first time. The pieces will be published online, early 2024. 

   To apply, you'll need:

• A developed pitch of the review/essay you'd like to write. Pitches should include a description of why you think you're the person to write this piece. 
• A writing sample that shows you at your best. It can be a previously published article, a paper for a class, or something you've come up with just for this. Commissions will be based on the quality of your pitch and of your writing, not how well-known or prolific you are.

Please submit your pitch and writing sample by 10 October, 2023.
   Accepted work will be paid $500AUD for 2000-3500 words. However, we are also interested in shifting the boundaries of the form, so we are also open to pitches which might make use of the digital medium/comics/games/etc, as critical forms.
   It is our aim to offer culturally sensitive editorial support, and as such, have some capacity to commission external editors if required.  
   Applicants will be notified by 10 November, 2023. We will open for submissions again early next year.

Writers Victoria welcomes pitches and submissions to our in-house print magazine ‘The Victorian Writer’.

We strongly advise all who submit that they read the most recent issues of ‘The Victorian Writer’ to acquaint themselves with material the magazine has previously published, and check out our upcoming themes.

Submissions are now open for The Victorian Writer for 2023. Please see below for the 2023 themes and submission periods.

Winter edition (June - August)

Theme: Blues

Submission deadline: Friday 24 March 2023.

Spring edition (September - November)

Theme: Lunar

Submission deadline: Tuesday 6 June 2023.

Summer edition (December 2023 - February 2024)

Theme: Rip

Submission deadline: Monday 11 September 2023. NB - deadline extended from previous date.

Submission Guidelines

We publish poems ($70), and articles/writing of 600 words ($100) and 1200 words ($200) in the print edition with particular interest in the craft of writing and the writing life.

If you would like to be considered for print publication, please submit either: 

• Your article, or a 100-word pitch with your article idea;
• Your poem/s;
• Your short fiction or non-fiction.

Also include a short author bio (and an example of your work if you haven’t been published with us before) by the issue’s deadline date.

All submissions are to be made via Submittable.

We particularly encourage member contributions and member pitches will be considered for both print and online publication. Extracts from member publications including fiction and memoir can also be submitted.

If you are successful in your pitch, our commissioning editor will be in touch regarding the article, licence agreements and final copy deadlines.

Please note, online article fees will be negotiated with the Writers Victoria team and there are no fees payable for book extracts or promotional material.

While we aim to publish as much as we can and support writers, we receive many more submissions than we can place, and can’t provide feedback on all pitches. But don’t be deterred! Keep submitting for following editions.