About
Writing Australia, the collaborative network of state writers’ centres, including ACT, NSW, NT, SA, Tasmania and Victoria, launches our new Digital Writers in Residence program. From June 2014, writers from each state and territory will take up digital residencies to blog, host readings, forums, talks and discussions. Each residency will have its own focus.
The first Digital Writer in Resident is Jennifer Mills from SA, who will be focussed on information and resource sharing, community building and networking, and experimenting with ways for us to engage more fully with regional writers.
About the Resident
Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). The Rest is Weight was shortlisted for the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award for an Australian Short Story Collection and longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Mills was awarded the 2014 Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship by the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In 2012 Mills was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Previous awards include the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the Northern Territory Literary Awards.
Mills’ fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been widely published, appearing in Meanjin, Hecate, Overland, Heat, Island, the Lifted Brow, the Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, and New Australian Stories, and broadcast, recorded and performed from Adelaide to Berlin. Mills was Asialink writer in residence in Beijing in 2010. She is a regular reviewer for Overland literary journal and has contributed criticism to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Wheeler Centre, and the Sydney Review of Books. She is currently the fiction editor at Overland. Mills lives in a very small town in South Australia, and is working on another novel.
Program
During her residency, Jennifer Mills will tweet (@digitalwir), blog (writersinresidence.wordpress.com), host a live Q&A for regional writers on writing craft, working online and how to sustain your writing practice in regional locations, engage our online writing community through weekly writing challenges, and trial creative writing experiments through social media.
At the end of the residency she will host a final live reading and evaluation session online.
Timeline
Monday 2 June Residency begins
Thursday 12 June, 3pm (ACST) Live Q&A : meet the resident / ask the writer
Monday 30 June, 6pm (ACST) Online Q&A : the resident reflects
