Fellowships

With the support of our project and funding partners, the SRB is able to offer a number of fellowships and residencies throughout the year. Our two flagship fellowship programs are the Emerging Critics Fellowship and the JUNCTURE Fellowship.

Emerging Critics Fellowship

The SRB is always on the lookout for new writers and new ways to think about our shared literary culture. That’s why, with the support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, we established a fellowship program in 2016 to foster diverse, provocative, and original critical voices, and to set pathways for emerging critics to develop their practice. Over the years, we’ve managed to increase the number of fellowships each round from three to five. In each cohort, at least one fellowship is awarded to a First Nations writer, and another to a culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) writer. Fellowships also reflect regional diversity and are allocated to critics from a minimum of three states and territories.

Here are what some of our alumni have to say:

I have never experienced as much editorial guidance and support as I was given as part of the Emerging Critics Fellowship. […] My writing was pushed to a much higher standard … and I became more confident in my voice as a result. [The] SRB treats the editorial process as an intellectually serious one, treating the essay as one would a work of literature, and I have found that deeply valuable.

— Dan Dixon (Emerging Critics Fellow, 2021)

Receiving the CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowship … was really beneficial for my critical practice. It enabled me to write longform book reviews consistently for a year, which helped build confidence as well as understand for myself what it looks like to pursue literary criticism—particularly important in a dwindling landscape where there are now few opportunities for emerging critics to focus on their craft on a sustained basis.

– Cher Tan (Emerging Critics Fellow, 2020)

You can meet our most recent cohort of Emerging Critics Fellows here.

JUNCTURE Fellowship

In 2019, and with the support of the Ian Potter Foundation, the SRB offered the first fellowship program for mid-career critics in Australia, addressing the relative dearth of opportunities for writers looking to sustain their critical practice. Since then, the JUNCTURE Fellowship has become one of the SRB’s most successful programs, providing a platform for seasoned critics of all genres to experiment and push the limits of the existing conventions of criticism.