Artists And Writer
In Residence

Glenfern Writers Incorporated

Georgina BANKS left Sydney at nineteen to study acting in New York at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and then worked as a performer throughout her twenties. Following her interest in what makes people tick, she changed direction and went back to university to study Applied Psychology. In her consulting business, Changeable, Georgina combines her psychology background and facilitation skills to enable meaningful change for individuals, teams and organisations. As a performer, Georgina worked mainly in theatre for companies such as Sydney Theatre Company, Playbox and Theatre South, and in television for shows like A Country Practice and Outback. Now Melbourne based, she has two daughters in their early twenties. Her first book Back to Bangka will be released by Penguin Random House in June this year. 

Alexandra COLLIER is an award-winning writer who has written for theatre, screen and print. Her memoir Inconceivable: Heartbreak, Bad Dates and Finding Solo Motherhood was recently released by Hachette. Her writing has appeared in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. She lived in New York for a decade where her work was produced Off Broadway, including Triplight, a musical written with ARIA award-winning composer Greta Gertler Gold, and her plays Underland and Take Me Home. Her play Holy Day was a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, she is a MacDowell fellow and a winner of the RE Ross Trust Playwrights Award. She lives by the bay in Naarm/Melbourne with her son.

Tali LAVI is a writer, critic (literary, film and theatre) and public interviewer. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Jewish Quarterly, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and The Monthly online, amongst other publications. ‘Counting’, an essay, was published in Marina Benjamin’s Garden Among Fires: A Lockdown Anthology. Tali has written a play titled Tales of Ash and has an MA in Creative Writing from RMIT University.

At Linden, Tali will focus on writing ‘Rags of Light’, a suite of connected essays. Haunting its telling are ideas of memory and contemporary being, of history as rupture, of reassemblage and metamorphosis. It is a work of cultural and critical engagement with multiple works of art, diverse in nature and origin.

Melissa MANNING is an Australian writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. Her debut interlinked story collection, Smokehouse, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction (2022), and was shortlisted for the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. Her writing has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Overland, Meanjin, Award Winning Australian Writing, To Carry Her Home (UK), and Best Small Fictions (USA).

Melissa’s current work in progress is Frogsong, a novel in segments. It charts the lives of childhood friends, then lovers, Caro and Danny as they move into early adulthood. Steeped in shared memories of their local waterhole, clouded by grief, and shot through with yearning and fierce loyalty, Frogsong is about what happens when the metamorphosis we anticipate in our lives plays out in unexpected ways.

Bram PRESSER is a semi-reformed punk rocker, recovering academic and lapsed lawyer. His novel, THE BOOK OF DIRT (Text Publishing), won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction (USA), the Voss Prize and three categories at the NSW Premiers Literary Awards including the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the UTS Glenda Award for New Writing and the People’s Choice Award. His stories have appeared in the Sleepers Almanac, Award Winning Australian Stories, Best Australian Stories and, most recently, MINDS WENT WALKING: PAUL KELLY’S SONGBOOK REIMAGINED (Fremantle Press). He also writes the popular novella-focussed Substack, A Book For Ants.

Isabel ROBINSON is a Melbourne writer and community arts practitioner. Her writing has been published in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Victorian Writer. At Linden, Isabel will work on middle-grade adventure novel The Last Featherbone in collaboration with her husband, Stephen Sholl. They have two young children and live in St Kilda.

Stephen SHOLL is a screenwriter who co-created the web series Altruman (ABC iView) and co-wrote the feature script Starfish (Screen Australia Springboard funding recipient; AWGIE Monte Miller finalist) and the short film Dario (premiere Melbourne International Film Festival) and script edited the award-winning drama series Hungry Ghosts (SBS).  At Linden he will predominantly be working on The Last Featherbone, a middle-grade novel about a girl who can talk to birds, with his wife, Isabel Robinson.

Anna SUBLET writes essays, features, comment pieces and creative nonfiction, with her work published in The New York Times (The Healing Power of Singing), The Guardian, Meanjin Quarterly, Island Magazine, The Age, Footy Almanac and Birdlife Australia. Anna's latest literary piece is published in Meanjin, on novelist/memoirist Deborah Levy, on women finding their voices and running their own races: Riding the High Horse with Deborah Levy

She is working on a political campaign diary/memoir based around an Independent candidate's winning campaign at the 2022 Federal election.

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