Update: 27 March 2018
We are delighted to announce that Michelle Kelly is the recipient of the inaugural Frontyard-SRB writer’s residency. Michelle’s essay, ‘Library in Bloom’, will be published on the Sydney Review of Books in the second half of 2018.
Four applicants were shortlisted for the residency:Justine Hyde, Hayley Scrivenor, Harriet McInerny and collaborators Stephanie Cobon and Caitlin Markwick-Doyle.
We thank all the applicants for their outstanding proposals for this residency.
The Sydney Review of Books and Frontyard invite applications for a two-week residency for a Sydney-based writer. The successful applicant will write a literary essay for publication on the Sydney Review of Books that draws on the resources held in the Frontyard library in Marrickville. This library is founded on the decommissioned Australia Council Research Library and is now a growing collection of material related to, and generated by, the Australian arts community.
This essay will form part of an ongoing portfolio of essays on place published on the Sydney Review of Books. Our place essayists have drawn on history, memoir, urban studies, literary history and other disciplinary tools to explore them mutually constitutive relationships between place and culture. This residency represents a new opportunity for site-specific literary practice, in that the writer will be working with and adjacent to an important physical archive of Australian cultural history. Essayists might consider single works or groups of works in the library, or engage with the collection as a whole. Essay topics may collide with the following areas of inquiry: libraries, ephemera, classification, cultural policy, digitisation, cultural custodianship, Australian literary history, book/magazine history, bibliography and bibliophilia, material histories.
To apply for this residency, writers will present a <300w EOI outlining their project and a short cover letter. The cover letter should give some indication of the use the writer will make of the library in their residency. The successful applicant will workshop her pitch and process with the SRB editor before taking up the residency; she will work the draft essay into its final published form with the SRB editor at the conclusion of the residency.
The successful applicant will receive a $1200 stipend, desk space at Frontyard for two weeks (between April and June 2018), editorial oversight and publication on the Sydney Review of Books.
The applications will be read and judged by a selection panel composed of SRB and Frontyard representatives.
Applications due: 13 March 2018.
Apply via Submittable.
Send any queries to SRB editor Catriona Menzies-Pike on editor@sydneyreviewofbooks.com
