The Varuna and Cove Park Writers' Residencies 2024/2025
The Cove Park/Varuna International Writers’ Exchange offers four-week funded residencies for writers and former residents of Cove Park and Varuna, the National Writers’ House of Australia. The programme has been altered slightly to take place over two years, with recipients travelling in alternating years. In autumn 2024, the Varuna writer travelled to Cove Park and the Cove Park writer will travel to Australia in the the autumn of 2025.
We are also pleased to be working for the first time on this programme with Wigtown Book Festival, connecting the participating writers with this acclaimed Scottish book festival.
In 2024, Brooke Robinson, an award winning playwright and novelist from Sydney came to Cove Park for her month-long residency. Her time in Scotland also included an appearance at Wigtown Book Festival.
Brooke had this to say about her residency: “As planned, I got thoroughly stuck in to working on what will be my forth novel during my time at Cove Park, really making an effort to step back and change direction as a novelist and to try to apply techniques and approaches I used in my previous career as a playwright. I also made some really interesting and unexpected connections – for example, with artists who work in Scottish prisons who’ve extended me an open invitation to come and speak to inmates at their prison, and run a writing workshop, whenever I can next get myself to Scotland.
I really appreciated the opportunity to meet with some local Scottish novelists at a lunch which Alexia at Cove Park kindly organised for me. It was particularly interesting to think about setting my future books in Australia (my first two are set in the UK) as Scottish authors arguably have the same practical issues which Australian novelists have. ie. Pressure to locate their work in, say, London or America rather than Scotland for practical and commercial reasons.
As for my visit to Wigtown, I really have nothing but wonderful things to say about this festival. It was extremely well-run and author friendly. I’ve been to a number of other international festivals as speaker – eg Crimefest in Bristol, Thrillerfest in NYC and Icelandnoir in Iceland – and Wigtown is easily my favourite. What’s so special is the author green room space which is open all day and into the evening. Many authors spend almost their entire festival just ‘hanging out’ in the green room and this makes it exceptionally social and fruitful in terms of networking and making connections. I sincerely hope they’ll invite me back again some day!”
In 2025, Sean Wai Keung, a Glasgow based poet and interdisciplinary artist, will spend a month in Australia at the Varuna Writer’s Centre.
