Award-winning author and essayist Luke Carman is the 2025 Writer-in-Residence.  Carman’s work focuses on life in the margins, geographically, socially and psychologically. His writing, including award-winning works such as An Elegant Young Man, Intimate Antipathies, and An Ordinary Ecstasy, is celebrated for its experimental style and distinctive voice that captures the rhythms and contradictions of suburban life in contemporary Australia, as well as its ability to articulate the experience of being outside the dominant cultural narrative.

Writer, editor and critic Fiona Wright, author of poetry collection Knuckled and book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, joined the Charles Perkins Centre as its eighth Judy Harris Writer-in-Residence. Fiona will work on her third collection of essays, inspired by her experience of COVID, examining future perspectives on science, society and selfhood.

Writer and journalist Lech Blaine, author of Car Crash: A Memoir and Quarterly Essay 'Top Blokes', will join the Charles Perkins Centre in mid-2023. Lech will study the heart and the brain, and the ability of diet and exercise to improve the condition of both. He will also contemplate the ethics of genetic editing and euthanasia.

The Fellowship’s first poet, Sarah Holland-Batt, academic, poet and aged-care advocate will use her residency to complete her fourth book of poetry and a book of personal essays. Deep brain treatment, the unknown side of Parkinson’s disease, ageing and mortality are among the subjects Sarah explores.

Acclaimed novelist Tracy Sorensen’s residency was spent working on the story of a woman’s advanced abdominal cancer as told from the point of view of her threatened and affected organs to be published later in 2022.

Author and writing teacher Emily Maguire spent her residency learning about the emotional and psychological implications of hoarding to write her sixth novel, Love Objects (Allen&Unwin, 2021), which examines social disadvantage, belonging, and health.

Written partly during her residency, Alana Valentine’s play Made to Measure premiered at the Seymour Centre in 2019 to positive reviews, addressing issues of health including the psychological impact of the nutrition wars. 

Mireille writes novels, short fiction, essays, scripts and reviews and her residency saw her researching research inherited trauma in epigenetics and the concept of the “doubled body” in pregnancy. This work will underpin a novel exploring contemporary life through the idea of the double.

Charlotte Wood was the Fellowship's first writer in residence., resulting in the Fellowship’s first novel The Weekend (Allen&Unwin) published in 2019. Dealing with friendship, community and ageing,  The Weekend was published to great critical acclaim and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, shortlisted for the Stella Prize, and won the Australian Book Industry’s Literary Fiction Book of the Year.