Eda Gunaydin
Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist, critic and short story writer from Western Sydney. She grew up in Blacktown and has worked in the region in a variety of roles. In 2017-18 she was an Associate Producer at WestWords, a literary organisation for young people based in Parramatta. She also held roles as Contributing Editor at the Sydney Review of Books and worked with the Writing and Society Research Centre (WSRC) as a mentor to young writers on The Writing Zone.
Eda is deeply invested in enriching the creative life of Parramatta and its surrounds. As one of three co-directors of the all-female Parramatta arts collective Finishing School, Eda has produced events and installations in the region for the past seven years, including for Parramatta's Lit!, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney Writers’ Festival, Parramatta Lanes, and Parramatta Artists Studios (PAS). She has also written films and essays about the region for Soft Stir, the Museum of Contemporary Art C3West and Powerhouse Parramatta.
Eda’s debut essay collection Root & Branch: Essays on Inheritance (NewSouth Publishing) was published in 2022, and brings together writing on growing up in Western Sydney, urban geography, and class and social inequalities in the region. Root & Branch won the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards' Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year.
Eda’s current work explores class, intergenerational trauma and futurity. She has been published widely in publications including Meanjin, HEAT, Sydney Review of Books, Cordite, and others. In 2025, she was the UTS x Copyright Agency New Writers’ Fellow, during which time she developed her second essay collection, This is Where I Leave You: Essays on Polycrisis. Eda is a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, and has taught politics at UOW’s Liverpool and Wollongong campuses. She lives in Strathfield, on Wangal land.
Photo credit: Paul Jones
