Introducing black&write! Fellowship Winner - Alison Whittaker

The judging is over and the results are in!

black&write! is pleased to congratulate poet Alison Whittaker on being awarded one of two Indigenous Writing Fellowships for 2015.

This year's Fellowship winners were selected out of a very strong field of entries from across Australia. It was fantastic to see such a wealth of talented writers!

Alison is a Gomeroi woman from Gunnedah and Tamworth, north-western New South Wales. She lives in Sydney and is currently studying a combined Bachelor of Arts in Communication (Writing and Cultural Studies) and Bachelor of Laws at UTS. Alison’s work has also been published in small press zines and university publications.

Her winning manuscript ‘Lemons in the Chicken Wire’ is a collection of poems about family, displacement, and love.  The judges described Alison's poems as ‘skilful and honest; this poet challenges the unimaginative’.
‘Lemons in the Chicken Wire’ was written over four years, inspired by small fragments of her own life. Alison defined the collection as an adapting, living work that explores ideas of displacement of self; she says that ‘Lemons in the Chicken Wire’ is about ‘finding place’, and ‘coming to terms with life at the borderlands’. Her hometown, Gunnedah, is ‘a very yellow place, the grass was always yellow and the sky was dusty and it was always very flat’, and this landscape inspires the images in her poetry.
We are delighted to be working with Alison to edit her winning manuscript this year.
Entries for the 2016 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowships open late 2015.