Applications are open for the 2022 Copyright Agency-UTS New Writer’s Fellowship, an initiative co-hosted by the Copyright Agency, and the University of Technology, which aims to assist Australian writers working on their (sometimes difficult) second or third novel. The fellowship helps cover a writer’s living costs for a year, allowing them to focus on their manuscript.
Australian writers are now invited to apply for this residency for 2022. It is well known that completing a second or third book is often difficult. This unique opportunity provides a writer with the financial security to complete a new work, to take creative risks, and to connect with Australia’s leading creative writing program.
His most recent novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” published in October, 2020, during the second wave of the pandemic, centers on the work of a fictional U.N. agency charged with solving climate change. The book combines science, politics, and economics to present a credible best-case scenario for the next few decades. It’s simultaneously heartening and harrowing. By the end of the story, it’s 2053, and carbon levels in the atmosphere have begun to decline. Yet hundreds of millions of people have died or been displaced. Coastlines have been drowned and landscapes have burned. Economies have been disrupted, refugees have flooded the temperate latitudes, and ecoterrorists from stricken countries have launched campaigns of climate revenge.
Perhaps more stories like this — that are both gloomy yet hopeful — might prompt more people to take climate change more seriously?
On Friday, the singer-songwriter posted a statement, titled “I Stand With Neil Young!”, to her website announcing the decision. “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote. “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”
The three-year role is intended to “acknowledge the contribution of fiction writers to Irish artistic and cultural life”, as well as to encourage new writers, and engagement with “high quality Irish fiction”.
Hot Desk fellows will also have the opportunity to meet, network and work with the Wheeler Centre’s resident organisations including Writers Victoria, Emerging Writers’ Festival, Australian Poetry, Express Media, Small Press Network and the Melbourne Writers Festival. In addition, Hot Desk Fellowships introduce emerging writers and their work to the public – we will feature all our writers and their projects on our website, as well as in a special Hot Desk Edition of The Next Big Thing series.
Applications for the fellowships are open now until Monday 28 February 2022.
Kimi, trailer, by American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, with Zoë Kravitz, and a virtual assistant named Kimi, in the lead roles, is a psychological thriller with some distinct shades of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. How can we go passed Hitchcock?
British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Klara and the Sun, is writing the screenplay for South African film director Oliver Hermanus‘ new feature, Living, an English language adaptation of Ikiru, the 1952 film by renown late Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood are set to star in the lead roles.
Entries for the 2022 Text Prize, an award for the best unpublished manuscript by young adult and children’s writers, are open until Monday 21 February 2022.
Works of fiction and non-fiction from authors both published and unpublished can be submitted, with the winner receiving a publishing contract with Melbourne based publisher Text Publishing, and a ten-thousand dollar advance against royalties.
Applications are also open for the Steph Bowe Mentorship for Young Writers, a Text Publishing initiative to encourage the work of writers under the age of twenty-five. The mentorship honours the work of late Australian young adult author and blogger Steph Bowe, who died in 2020.
Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase wrote the screenplay for her debut feature The Pink Cloud in 2017, and filming finished in 2019. If that seems kind of ho-hum, watch the trailer…
