2026 Writer’s Space Residential Fellowship Recipients
We’re thrilled to announce the six recipients for the 2026 Writer’s Space Fellowship for writers with disability. We received an incredible 100 applications for this program and our assessors - Beejay Silcox, Jennifer Wong and Christopher Bryant - commented on what a pleasure it was to read everyone’s work.
We look forward to welcoming Alex Creece, Andi Spark, Emma Osborne, Marino O, Rachael Wenona Guy and Tim Loveday to Varuna next year.
Congratulations also to these highly commended applications: Krystle Herdy, Ruby Stevenson, Aimee Knight, Barbarella Tajana Karpinski, Tyswan Slater, Carly Jay Metcalfe, Rae White, Helen Ho, Samia Goudie and Bruce Mutard.
ABOUT THE RECIPIENTS
Alex Creece
Alex Creece is writer, editor, collage artist and average kook living on Wadawurrung land. Alex works in editorial roles for Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Sunder Journal, and her writing has been widely published. Alex is the author of Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth (Cordite Books, 2024), which was highly commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize.
Andi Spark
Andi Spark creates graphic narratives for both print and moving image form, with a focus on serious-humorous stories centred around marginality, disability, and the female experience. Over four decades in the animation field, working internationally across both industry and academia, she has nurtured studios and departments, films, television series, live performances, exhibitions, installations, books, articles, & the championing of impossible ideas. She is currently creating on a long-form graphic memoir, titled “What?!?”, about the experience of getting a cochlear implant.
Emma Osborne
Emma Osborne (they/them) is a queer fiction writer and poet from Naarm Melbourne, Australia. They live with chronic pain. Emma’s writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, Podcastle, the Review of Australian Fiction, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, GlitterShip, Kaleidotrope, WASTELANDS 3: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams and HOMETOWN HAUNTS edited by Poppy Nwosu. Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Their debut horror novella GRIEF EATER is forthcoming at Interstellar Flight Press. They currently live in Sunbury with their girlfriend and three wonderful cats.
Marina O
Marina O is a writer and filmmaker of mixed Slavic heritage living on unceded Wurundjeri lands. They write fiction, memoir and poetry to recover erased queer lineages. Recently, Marina's writing has been published in Meniscus, Cordite Poetry Review and highly commended in AAWP/Westerly Magazine Life writing Prize.
Rachael Wenona Guy
Rachael Wenona Guy creates writing, visual art and performance. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and anthologies including Overland, Sleepers Almanac, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology and most recently ‘Raging Grace’, an anthology of collaborative writing on disability. Walleah Press published her debut poetry collection ‘The Hungry Air’ in 2020. In 2025 she was awarded third in the Elizabeth Jolley Short story prize. She is currently working on a new collection of experimental poetic memoir. Originally from Tasmania, she now lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.
Tim Loveday
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2025 DHA, 2024 Montreal Poetry Prize, 2024 Big Australian Yarn, and 2023 David Harold Tribe Prize. Tim is the incoming poetry editor at Island Magazine.e.