Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award 2019 banner

I’m so excited to share that I’ve been shortlisted for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award (KYDUMA). This award is built to support emerging writers in the development of a manuscript. At the start of July I was lucky to be longlisted alongside seven others. I was so proud to have made that list, and I’m blown away to have now made the shortlist, too, and I’m in fantastic company.

This shortlisting means that I receive a KYD/Varuna Copyright Agency Fellowship. In September, I’ll be be heading out to Katoomba along with the three other shortlisters. At Varuna, we’ll have dedicated time (a week!) and space to workshop our manuscripts, with help from Bec Starford from KYD.

My manuscript, Eating with my Mouth Open, is something I’ve been working on in some form or another since 2014. It started as my Honours thesis, which looked at how the lyric essay could shed light on the relationship between food and memory. Beyond Honours, the idea grew to look at memory more deeply, but also mental health, and the difficulties of embodiment. It puts these things in their cultural context. It explores shame and celebration in equal parts.

Getting to Varuna on a fellowship has been a long-term goal of mine. Finding a home for this work is another. It’s nice to know that these things are now dovetailing, and that the achievement of one can hopefully aid the achievement of the other.