The 2025 Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship is open for applications.

Applications open Monday 9 September 2024
Applications close midnight Monday 25 November 2024

Presented by Writing NSW and Text Publishing, with support from the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN), the mentorship is awarded annually to an unpublished Indigenous writer who has made substantial progress on a work of fiction or non-fiction. The intention of the program is to support the writer to develop their manuscript and to facilitate a pathway to publication.

The program pairs an emerging Indigenous writer from anywhere in Australia with an established Indigenous writer for a structured year-long mentorship. The writer receives 20 hours of mentorship over the following year, including feedback on their work in progress and general advice on writing and developing a publishing career. If possible, an opportunity to meet with the mentor face to face is provided. The writer also receives editorial feedback and manuscript development from Text Publishing and access to Writing NSW professional development services.

On winning the mentorship in 2024, Kalem Murray said: ‘I am incredibly excited for this amazing opportunity. Having the brilliant Mykaela Saunders as a mentor can only help refine my skill as a writer, and with her guidance make the murky text I put to paper that much more legible. Thank you so much John Morrissey, Writing NSW and Text Publishing for choosing my manuscript and giving me this chance.’

At the conclusion of the mentorship, Text Publishing have the exclusive first right to consider the winning manuscript for publication, under terms to be negotiated with the writer. Since the establishment of the mentorship in 2019 three of the mentored writers, John Morrissey, Lenora Thaker, and Alannah Hunt have been offered publishing deals by Text Publishing.

The Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship opened for applications on Monday 9 September 2024 and will close on Monday 25 November 2024.

It will be judged by Jeanine Leane, a Wiradjuri writer, poet, critic, and essayist from southwest New South Wales. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887-1961 (2010, Presspress) won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, 2010. She was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice; and was the 2019 recipient of the Red Room Poetry Fellowship for her project called Voicing the Unsettled Space: Rewriting the Colonial Mythscape. Her most recent work, Gawimarra, gathering was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2024.

For more information on the Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship, visit the Writing NSW website. 

Writing NSW acknowledges all the First Nations people of what is now the state of NSW and pays respects to their elders and storytellers, past, present and emerging.