Upcoming Events
MQ University Open Day 2024
Study creative writing @ MQ
Find your voice. Express yourself powerfully and persuasively. Tell stories and touch people.
In this major you will:
Experiment with words.
Explore different forms of writing: fairy tales, poetry, short stories, genre fiction (e.g. fantasy, science fiction, romance), novel writing, and creative non-fiction.
Workshop your writing. Learn feedback and editing skills.
Find markets for your writing.
Edit and publish your work in our literary magazine, The Quarry.
Experience industry internships with authors and writing organisations.
To register for the open day, click here.
For more information about the Creative Writing program at MQ, click here.
Mykaela Saunders Always Will Be Book Launch
Join Dr Mykaela Saunders as she discusses her prize-winning short story collection Always Will Be with Dr Michelle Hamadache. Drinks and light refreshments provided. Books will be available for purchase.
RSVP: Michelle.hamadache@mq.edu.au
Where? Readers and Writers Room, Arts Precinct, 25Wally’s Walk B, Macquarie University. Wallumattagal Campus.
DR MYKAELA SAUNDERS is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, researcher, editor and teacher.
Mykaela is the author of the speculative fiction collection ALWAYS WILL BE (UQP 2024), which won the David Unaipon Award, and the editor of THIS ALL COME BACK NOW, the Aurealis Award-winning, world first anthology of blackfella spec fic (UQP 2022). Mykaela has won other prizes for fiction, poetry, life writing and research, including the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize. Her writing has been widely published across forms, genres and disciplines, and all of her major creative projects have attracted funding and fellowships.
Mykaela is currently a postdoctoral research fellow and holds a Macquarie University Fellowship for Indigenous Research. Her project is called LAYING DOWN THE LORE: a survey of First Nations speculative, visionary and experimental fiction. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education in various capacities since 2003, and taught at the tertiary level since 2012. Her research explores her community’s past, present and future.
Of Dharug descent and belonging to the Tweed Goori community, Mykaela lives and works with gratitude on the lands of the Dharug, Kulin, and Bundjalung nations – Sydney, Melbourne, and the northern rivers of NSW.
5 Island Press Poetry Prize
FIVE ISLAND PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK OF POETRY SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED FOR 2023
We are excited to announce the shortlist of titles for the 2022–23 Prize.
Moon Wrasse Willo Drummond, Puncher & Wattmann
Secret Third Thing Dan Hogan, Cordite Publishing Inc.
Greatest Hit Holly Isemonger, Vagabond Press
Time Machines Caroline Williamson, Vagabond Press
The winning and commended books will be announced at a Zoom event on Wednesday 29 November, 6.30–7.30 pm (AEST Melbourne time): https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/2338614152?pwd=aVhRZElvYjh1T2ZId2h1QW9ZbThS UT09 Password: 106945
Everyone is welcome to attend to hear the judges’ report and readings from the finalists. Please join us to celebrate these new poets, their poetry, and their publishers.
Submissions are open until 15 July next year for the 2024 Prize. There are no entry fees. For details on how to submit, please go to https://www.canberra.edu.au/five-islands-prize/
The Five Islands Prize is grateful for support from Five Islands Press and the University of Canberra, and for its associations with Australian Poetry Ltd as a communication partner, and the 3CR Spoken Word program.
Masterclass: ‘Stuckness’ as Creative Process: On Writing and Not Writing Poetry with Prose Poet and Professor of Creative Writing Oz Hardwick, Leeds Trinity University
Key Speaker:
Professor Oz Hardwick is an international award-winning poet and academic, with a particular interest in prose poetry, whose work has been published and performed internationally in and on diverse media. He has published thirteen well-received poetry collections, a number of collaborative works, and has had several hundred individual poems in anthologies and journals. He has edited and co-edited numerous anthologies, and has published articles on poetics and Creative Writing practice and pedagogy. Oz has contributed to many international conferences - including organising the first UK prose poetry conference in 2019 - and has spoken and read his work at numerous festivals, and has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia. Along with Anne Caldwell, he recently edited the collection of essays, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice, Routledge, 2022.
Guest speakers:
Associate Professor Marcelle Freiman is a published poet and researcher whose research focus is on Creative Writing and its practice, theory and pedagogy. She has published articles on the practice and theory of Creative Writing, with a current interest in cognition, creativity and theories of extended and distributed cognition in writing process. She also researches poetry and poetics, with a specialty in ekphrasis. Marcelle's third book of poetry Spirit Level is published by Puncher & Wattmann (NSW) in 2021, and her two previous collections are White Lines (Vertical) (Hybrid Publishers 2010), and Monkey's Wedding (Island Press Co-op 1995), which was highly commended for the ASAL Mary Gilmore award. For over two decades, her poetry has appeared in anthologies and literary journals in Australia and overseas.
Dr Willo Drummond is an Australian poet, researcher and sessional lecturer who teaches in the Masters of Creative Writing program at Macquarie University. Her interdisciplinary research draws upon theories of distributed cognition to illuminate creative writing cognition and practice. Willo’s scholarship and poetry can be found in TEXT, AXON, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Canberra Times, Island, Griffith Review and elsewhere. Willo has been the recipient of a Vice Chancellor's commendation for Academic Excellence for her PhD in creative writing (2019), a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts (2020), shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award (2022), and runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (2021). Her debut collection Moon Wrasse was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023.
Elizabeth Walton is an MRes candidate at Macquarie University and holds a Master of Creative Writing from Macquarie and a Macquarie University Award for Excellence. She has publications in Brushstrokes, the 2023 Ros Spencer Poetry Prize Anthology, Meniscus and Overland. Elizabeth received the Anne Edgeworth fellowship and second place in the AAWP and Woollahra Digital Literary awards. She is also a musician and freelance writer.
Can’t join us live?
Not a problem! Click here to join us on Zoom.
N E W S Poetry
Poetry Sydney and MQ University present N E W S, a live and live-streamed event held at Knox St Bar, 11 Knox St Chippendale.
Tickets: 2 for $20. You plus BF Poetry Sydney
A night of poetry performances, short films and live music.
Book Launch @ WestWords: Paris Rosemount's Banana Girl
Book launch: Paris Rosemount’s Banana Girl
Poetry, bananas, banana cake and banana paddle pops at: