2025 Varuna Climate Fellowship Announcement
We’re pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Varuna Climate Fellowship, running 8 - 15 September 2025. The fellowship offers non-fiction writers focused on projects related to climate change and the environment a week-long residency at Varuna, offering time and space to write, as well as the opportunity to network and connect with others working across literature, academia, journalism, grassroots organising and activism.
This year, the program will also include an online roundtable with co-founders and co-editors of Science Write Now, Dr Jessica White and Dr Amanda Niehaus, covering climate science, writing, and publishing nationally and internationally. Selected pieces by the fellowship awardees will also be considered for publication in Science Write Now in 2026.
Congratulations to the six writers below and the writers who have been selected as ‘Highly Commended’.
This program is supported by The Bridge Awards Foundation.
Cynthia Banham is a writer, lawyer and habitat gardener. She spent two decades in Canberra, working as a journalist in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, later completing a PhD in Regulation, Justice & Diplomacy at the ANU. Returning to Sydney, she became immersed in restoring her garden into a wilder place of refuge for frogs, lizards, insects and small birds. For this, she completed a horticulture certificate and commenced a Bachelor of Biodiversity and Conservation. She is the author of three non-fiction books. A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her latest, Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance, will be published by Upswell in 2026.
Jo Chandler is an award-winning freelance journalist, author, editor and journalism educator. Her focus is on explanatory, boots-on-the-ground reporting exploring a diverse range of issues including the science and impacts of global heating. She has filed from Africa, Australia, Antarctica, Afghanistan and, frequently over the past 15 years, Papua New Guinea. She has earned numerous distinctions including the 2023 Australia Museum Eureka Prize for Science journalism and two Walkley awards. Formerly a senior staffer at The Age, her work has featured in Nature, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Yale Environment 360,The Lancet, The Monthly, Griffith Review and ABC Radio National and among others. She is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the University of Melbourne Climate Futures network. She is the author of a book on climate science Feeling The Heat.
Credit: Manual Ashman
Lauren Fuge is a writer who lives and works on Kaurna Country. She’s currently undertaking a PhD exploring storytelling and the climate crisis, as well as organising with grassroots community and climate groups. She previously worked as a science journalist; her work has won the 2023 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards (magazine category) and the 2022 UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing. Her book, Voyagers: Our Journey into the Anthropocene, was published by Text in 2024.
Lesley Head is a geographer who researches the cultural dimensions of environmental issues including climate change. Her latest book is Beyond Green. The social life of Australian nature(MUP 2025), a draft extract from which was shortlisted for The Nature Conservancy’s 2023 Nature Writing Prize. Earlier books include Plants: Past, Present and Future (with Zena Cumpston and Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Thames and Hudson First Knowledges series 2022) and Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene (Routledge 2016).
Lesley is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne. Her service roles include the Board of Climate for Change (an NGO focused on helping people have effective conversations about climate change, and translate this to political action), the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the Australian Council of Learned Academies Steering Committee for the Australian Energy Transition Research Plan.
Patrick Lau is a journalist who writes on the intersection of business and environment, particularly climate change.
Dani Netherclift is a poet and essayist living and writing on unceded Taungurung Country. Her first book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies was published in Australia by Upswell in 2024 and is forthcoming with Assembly Press in North America in 2026. Her shorter essays and poetry have been widely published and awarded, commended, long and shortlisted.
Congratulations to the six writers listed above, as well as the writers marked Highly Commended: Lee Constable, Rowena Ivers, Claire Scobie and Deborah Wardle.
