2025 Varuna International Exchange New Zealand
We are excited to announce the fellowship recipients for the Varuna International Exchange - New Zealand, with an Australian writer visiting Michael King Writers Centre for four weeks, and a writer from New Zealand traveling to Varuna, and appearing at the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival. The exchange was open to Varuna alumni who had published new work between 2021 - 2025.
The Australian recipient of this year’s international exchange in New Zealand is Fiona Murphy and the New Zealand fellowship recipient is Ingrid Horrocks.
We would also like to highlight the Highly Commended Australian writers who were shortlisted: Liz Evans, Veronica Gorrie, Kris Kneen, Mark O’Flynn and Anne-Marie Te Whiu.
This program is made possible with funding from Creative Australia.
Photo credit: Jade Warne
Fiona Murphy is an award-winning writer and arts critic based in the Blue Mountains. Her writing about disability, accessibility and the arts has appeared in The Guardian, ABC, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, The Big Issue. In 2021, her memoir about deafness (The Shape of Sound) was released in Australia, New Zealand, UK and North America. In 2022, it was highly commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and longlisted in the Australia Book Industry Awards (ABIA). She is a MacDowell Fellow (2022) and Peter Blazey Fellow (2024).
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb
Ingrid Horrocks’ fiction debut, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, is forth-coming with THWUP and UQP in 2025/6. Her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, Sydney Review of Books, Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian, and her other books include Where We Swim (THWUP and UQP, 2021), described by Australian Book Review as a “luminous” “work of wondrous depth.” She was the 2024 Creative NZ Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters, and in 2025 is teaching online for the Faber Writing Academy at A&U. During her residency she will be working on a novel set in the same world as All Her Lives. She lives in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington, with her partner and twin daughters.
