Meet the Writers

Each year, in addition to the successful recipients, the Judges identified five highly commended entries to The Next Chapter. 

2024 Highly commended 

Munira Tabassum Ahmed (NSW) is an 18-year-old writer. Her work is published in Best of Australian Poems 2021, Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Liminal, Runway Journal, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, and elsewhere. She was the 2022 Kat Muscat Fellow, a Youth Ambassador for Red Room Poetry, and a medalist at the 2022 National Youth Poetry Slam. 

Fernanda Dahlstrom (QLD) is a writer, editor and lawyer who lives in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Feminartsy, Mascara Literary Review, Art Guide and Sydney Review of Books. 

Liz Habermann (SA) was born in Brisbane in 1970. Throughout her lifetime she has lived in various regions, and is now happily settled in a small country town on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia where she and her husband have owned the local bakery for sixteen years. The mother of five has always enjoyed reading and is now eight years into learning the art of writing with hopes that one day, she can call herself a writer. 

Alana Hicks (NSW) is a Papua New Guinean-born, Gadigal-based writer and director. She was the inaugural winner of the 2020 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition and is currently working on her debut novel Home is a Foreign Country. As a director, her short films have featured in film festivals such as Flickerfest, BFI London Film Festival and SXSW Sydney. In her spare time she likes to juggle fruit and then eat the fruit, complaining loudly that it’s all bruised. 

Gurmeet Kaur (VIC) is a poet and critic living on Wurundjeri Country. Her work appears in Kill Your Darlings, Ambit, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Peril, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of residencies and fellowships from Varuna, Footscray Arts Centre, City of Maribyrnong and others. Gurmeet is a participant of Malthouse Theatre’s Besen Emerging Writer Group and a New Critic at Kill Your Darlings in 2023.

 

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2021 Highly commended

Jessica Knight is a writer and conflicted heathen based in Naarm. She is currently working on a memoir novel about her childhood growing up Mormon and chronically ill on a dairy farm. You can read more of her work at jessicaknight.com.au or follow her on Twitter (@TheMess19) or Instagram (@tinywhirlwind_82).

May Ngo is a writer, former academic and dumpling lover. She has been published in the Mascara Literary Review, The Lifted Brow, Sydney Review of Books and Kill Your Darlings. She received the Kill Your Darlings New Critics Award 2021 and the Sydney Review of Books 2021 Juncture Fellowship. She has also written an audio drama series for the German podcast platform Podimo. She is currently working on a crime fiction novel, as well as some short stories. www.mayngo.net

Guan Un is an Australian writer of Malaysian-Chinese heritage. He loves sentences, dumplings and sentences about dumplings. He lives in Sydney’s inner-west, with wife, two children, and a dog named after a tiger.  Before writing, he got a theology degree, worked as a luggage salesman, and when he’s not behind a keyboard writing, he’s behind a keyboard as a software developer.

Guan has stories forthcoming from khōréō, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and is currently working on an inter-generational monster hunting novel, based in a Sydney touched by the mythos of immigrants. He writes at guanun.com, and has an occasional newsletter about sentences at https://buttondown.email/topicsentence

Belinda Zipper is a transgender woman living with a chronic disease.

As a child of the 1970s, gender transition was effectively inconceivable. After a couple failed attempts at cross-dressing (back then the language allowed for either that or ‘transvestite’), Belinda settled for a life of career, travel, family and friends – albeit as a male.

In 2014, at the age of 44, she experienced a symptom of what would soon be diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease. Two weeks after that first symptom she had a dream that she was living as a woman. Belinda started her journey as a trans woman, and saw the dream as the voice of her subconscious self waking her up to the urgency of reclaiming her body before she loses it to a pernicious degenerative disease.

She now lives with more purpose, love and gratitude than ever – buoyed by the euphoria of living as her authentic self, but also grounded by the sobering urgency that comes with a progressively debilitating disease.

 

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2020 Highly commended

Frances An is a Vietnamese-Australian writer interested in the literatures of communism, overlaps between literature and psychology, and Nhạc Vàng (‘Yellow/Gold Music’). She has performed/published in Australian and international literary platforms including Sydney Review Of Books, Seizure Online, Cincinnati Review, Sydney Writers Festival, Panoplyzine, Journal and Star 82. She received a Create NSW 2018 Early Career Writers Grant and Inner City Residency 2020 (Perth, WA, Australia). She is completing a PhD in Psychology at the University Of Western Australia on corporate misconduct.

Theo Anderson spends his days working as a speech pathologist and his weekends writing. He loves reading and writing LGBTQIA+ fiction and non-fiction. Theo lives with his partner and two dogs on Turrbal and Yuggera land and is currently working on his first novel.

Sianlee Harris is a Kurnu Paakantyi Nhuungku from Wilcannia, NSW. She has been working in the public education sector for the majority of her adult life, and has a specific interest in recording and teaching Indigenous languages and histories. She enjoys creating work that celebrates Blak women.

Her body of work comes from the worldview of a Kurnu Paakantyi Nhuungku. The pieces are at once personal and political, in keeping with Sian’s stance that her presence, as a self-presenting Blak Woman, in systems and structures built to exclude her, is a radical act.

Her work focuses on Paakantyi Spirituality; Aboriginal resistance; and representations of womanhood. She is a storyteller. Her writing is unapologetically Aboriginal and asserts that her people have many stories to tell. It asserts that Aboriginal writing can, and should, explore the gamut of human experience, thus stepping away from ‘approved’ versions voice and truth. It acknowledges the existence of women like her.

Tais Rose is an Aboriginal writer and weaver living on Bundjalung country. With a complex displaced cultural identification developed through ongoing colonisation, her poetry seeks to highlight the significance of decolonisation work while celebrating a resilient connection to Aboriginal culture and Country as it is inevitably passed on through blood.

My name is Aubert Ruzigandekwe, I was born in the country of thousand hills, Rwanda, and I came to live in the lucky country, Australia, in 2004. I live in Hobart with my wife, and we are lucky to have 4 biological children and three adopted children.

I’m a survivor of the Rwandan Tutsis’ genocide of 1994, where the drive to write my story comes from.

I’m employed by Services Australia in its international branch.

I have always been in love with the world game, I played semi-professional football, and I’m a social player now. I also have been a community soccer coach for over 15 years. I started a couple of social soccer clubs in Rwanda, and in Europe for the Rwandan community. I’m also involved in a number of charities that support the survivors of the Tutsi genocide.

 

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2019 Highly commended

Alice Boyle is a Melbourne-based writer and ELICOS teacher. She studied creative writing, French and Spanish at the University of Melbourne, and is currently learning Flemish. She’s passionate about languages; she spends her days working with students from varied language backgrounds and her nights writing LGBTQIA+ young adult fiction. Her short story, ‘The Exchange’, was published in Growing Up Queer in Australia, and she’s currently writing her first novel. She lives with her Belgian partner on Wurundjeri land.

Alex Creece is a writer, poet, student and average kook living on Wadawurrung land (Geelong, Victoria). She is the Production Editor at Cordite Poetry Review, and was recently awarded a 2019 Write-ability Fellowship with Writers Victoria. Alex is passionate about neurodiversity in the arts, particularly given its intersections with other forms of identity and social inequity.

Creative writing often allows Alex to draw from her own experiences as a queer and autistic woman with mental health conditions. She is currently cobbling together her debut poetry manuscript, through which she hopes to capture her world both as whimsically and unapologetically as possible.

Kate McCabe grew up exploring the bush land surrounding her home suburb of Eltham, which founded her enduring passion for Victoria’s native flora and fauna. She studied Zoology and Teaching and after a short stint as a classroom teacher, joined Zoos Victoria, where she has worked as an education officer for the last 14 years.

At the beginning of 2019, Kate moved with her young family from the leafy Macedon Ranges to coastal Bellarine Peninsula, with the aim of spending more time with her family and finally pursuing her dream of being an author.

Vicky Xiuzhong Xu is a researcher for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cyber Policy Centre. Previously, she was a journalist for the New York Times Sydney Bureau and ABC’s Asia Pacific Newsroom in Melbourne, covering China and Australia and everything in between. Born and raised in China, she was educated in China, Australia, and Israel. She’s also a stand-up comedian and delivered the 2019 Chaser Lecture. And of course, she is writing a novel too – her unsuccessful entry for The Next Chapter.

 

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2018 Highly commended

Mehdi Habibi started learning English in 2010, while in Curtin Immigration Detention Centre. Since being released, he has completed a Certificate IV in Spoken and Written English, and more recently a Diploma of Counselling from the Australian College of Applied Psychology. He is currently enrolled in a Bachelor of Counselling at the Australian College of Applied Psychology.

He writes short stories, poetry and satire. His writing in Farsi has been published in various journals including The Republic of Silence and HalazoonMag. In 2017, he published a short story in Southerly magazine.

Fiona Murphy is a poet and essayist. Her work has been published in the Age, Big Issue, Meanjin and Kill Your Darlings, among others. She recently performed Sign poetry at the 2018 Jakarta Writers’ Series.

Bobuq Sayed is a freelance writer, artist and community organiser of the Afghan diaspora. They co-edit Archer Magazine and co-founded the activist collective Colour Tongues. They have performed new work at the Emerging Writers’ Festival and Melbourne Writers Festival, and their work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Black Girl Dangerous, Overland, Peril and Vice.

Adut Wol Akec is currently a freelance hairdresser, and before that, worked as a medical receptionist. She recently graduated from Victoria University with a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Environmental Management.