2026 Affirm Press Fellowship Recipients

We are excited to announce the recipients of this year’s Affirm Press Fellowship.

Four applications were selected from 103 submissions, which were shortlisted by two external assessors, Mirandi Riwoe and Jock Serong. The final decision was made by Affirm Press’s editorial team.

Congratulations to Catherine Padmore, Michelle Tom, Sam Elkin and co-writers Georgia Grubelich-Foo and Trent Foo.

Their 1-week residency at Varuna includes meetings with Affirm Press editors. We look forward to welcoming the writers to the house in November.

Catherine Padmore

Catherine’s novel, Sibyl’s Cave (Allen and Unwin, 2004), was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Award and commended in the first book category of The Commonwealth Writers' Prize (south-east Asia/south Pacific region). Her short creative works have won the Ada Cambridge award (2024), the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) creative writing prize (2022), and the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing (Local, 2020), placed second in the Peter Carey prize (2017) and the Boroondara Literary Awards (2021), and been shortlisted for multiple others. Many have been published in journals (including Antipodes, The Review of Australian Fiction and Island) and in anthologies.

Michelle Tom

Michelle Tom is a former print journalist and author of the memoir Ten Thousand Aftershocks (HarperCollins Australia, 2021). Born in New Zealand and now living in Melbourne, her writing explores the intersections of history, memory, place and family. She is currently completing Wild at the Bone, a literary historical novel based on a nineteenth-century poisoning case in colonial New Zealand. Away from the page, she enjoys painting, hand-spinning yarn and tending a vegetable garden that rarely cooperates.

Sam Elkin

Sam Elkin is a writer, radio-maker and community lawyer. His debut book is Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga, which was published in 2024 by Upswell and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Humour Writing and the National Biography Prize in 2025. He is also the co-editor of the anthology Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (Allen & Unwin) and co-hosts the 3RRR radio show Queer View Mirror.

[Photo credit: Wildhardt]

Georgia Grubelich-Foo

Georgia Grubelich-Foo is a historical fiction writer based on Gadigal country. An Australian Writers Centre alumni, she is an active member in writing communities across Sydney, Perth and Los Angeles and has a particular interest in all things multicultural, glamorous and scandalous.