The 2025 Frank Moorhouse Reading Room Writers-in-Residence
It’s with great pleasure that we announce the recipients of the 2025 Frank Moorhouse Reading Room residency.
In May–June, we will host the following writers:
Lur Alghurabi is an Iraqi and Australian writer. She is the winner of the AM Heath Prize for Prose and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize, and shortlistee of the Deborah Cass Prize. Her work has been widely published in Australia and the US. Lur holds an Oxford University Masters in Creative Writing with Distinction, and was Director of the National Young Writers’ Festival. She is working on her first book of personal essays.
Beejay Silcox is a book critic. Her work appears in high-profile publications across three continents, and is renowned for its resolute (some might say, foolhardy) honesty. In addition to writing, Beejay works as a professional reader: she’s a literary interviewer, prize judge, festival programmer, editor and educator. And she has stories to tell. Beejay eloped to Las Vegas, escaped from quicksand, and drove to Timbuktu in a car held together with a bra-strap. She once had to be rescued – unironically – from a picnic at Hanging Rock.
Ali Jane Smith is the author of the poetry collection The Strange Matter (Life Before Man, 2025). Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Southerly, Overland, Rabbit, Cordite, and Sydney Review of Books. She is a Red Room Poetry and Varuna Alumnus. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, and in 2016 she was one of three writers selected for the inaugural Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics program. She has given readings at Servo Food Truck Bar in Port Kembla, The Sydney Poetry Lounge in Glebe, That Poetry Thing on a Monday Night at Smith’s Alternative in Canberra and Puckey’s Night Markets, Fairy Meadow.
In October, we will host the following writers:
Sam Elkin is a writer, radio maker and community lawyer living on unceded Wurundjeri land. In 2022, Sam co-edited Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. In 2024, Sam published his debut book Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Humour and the North American 2024 Foreword INDIE Awards. His essays have been published in the Griffith Review, Meanjin and Kill Your Darlings.
Thomas Moran is a writer and researcher who has recently completed a PhD at Monash University on the death of cinema. Thomas is interested in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Australian literary history and modernist poetry.
Cher Tan is an essayist and critic in Naarm/Melbourne, via Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide and Singapore, where she was born and raised. Her essays, criticism and other written work have been published widely. She is the editor at Liminal and the reviews editor at Meanjin. Her critically acclaimed debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is out with NewSouth Publishing.
Congratulations to all these writers – and a big thank you to everyone who applied. It’s the first time we’ve run this small program, and we were delighted to receive many more applications than we had anticipated – a testament to the strength of Frank Moorhouse’s legacy, among other things.
We look forward to publishing the essays that will emerge from the writers-in-residence’s engagement with the Moorhouse collection, and to continuing the thread of reflection and advocacy that made Moorhouse such a distinctive figure in Australian literary history.
The 2025 Frank Moorhouse Reading Room Writer-in-Residence Program would not be possible without the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Whitlam Institute.
