Bundanon

Melinda Smith is a poet, fiction writer, editor, teacher, part-time lawyer and performer. Her latest book is Man-handled (Recent Work Press, 2020). She is the author of seven other poetry books, including the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award winner, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call, and her work has been widely anthologised and translated. She has received three substantial ArtsACT creative grants to write new work, as well as a Bundanon residency in 2016 and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Grant (Writers Victoria) in 2018. Recently she co-edited the Australian Poetry Anthology Vol. 8 with Sara Saleh, and Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry with Saba Vasefi and Yvette Holt. She frequently collaborates with artists in other disciplines including dancers, musicians and visual artists. She is a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times, and lives and writes on unceded Ngunnawal Country.  

Lives / works: Ngunnawal country, Canberra

Helen Thurloe is a Sydney writer and poet. Her debut novel, Promising Azra, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016, shortlisted for a NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2017, and awarded the Society of Women Writers NSW Young Adult Book Award in 2018. Helen’s poetry has been published widely, and her poems placed in over thirty national awards, including First in both the ACU Prize for Literature (2014) and the Quantum Words Science Poetry Competition (2018). She has undertaken multiple writing residencies at Varuna, along with the Society of Women Writers NSW Di Yerbury Residency (UK), the KSP Writers’ Centre Fellowship (WA), the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Residential Fellowship (SA), and Arteles Creative Center (Finland).  She lives and writes on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. 

Lives / works: On the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, Sydney

In residence at Bundanon

Sisters K is a fiction writing team comprising Melinda Smith (ACT) and Helen Thurloe (NSW). At Bundanon we will do a deep edit of our joint project, working title Burning the Seeds, a novel set during the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. The protagonist, middle-aged mum-of-two Genevieve, undertakes a journey of sexual self-discovery made even more fraught by snap lockdowns, masks, and contact tracing.  The book explores, from a female perspective, what intimacy means in contemporary Australia and how the pandemic has affected and continues to affect its expression.