Dael Allison

Dael Allison has won numerous awards for poetry, the Varuna Award for an Unpublished novel and the International Wildcare Prize for Environmental Writing, and was awarded three residencies at Varuna and a Wildcare residency at Maria Island, Tasmania. Her Masters in creative writing from UTS, 2012, explored the life and work of Australia’s first modernist artist, Ian Fairweather, and poems from her book Fairweather’s Raft (Walleah Press) featured in an ABC Poetica soundscape. In 2024 she was awarded a PhD in creative writing from the University of Newcastle for her thesis Fig: Narrative Newcastle, a critical exegesis and short story cycle engaging with literary narratives of Newcastle. Her research surveyed and evaluated representations of the region in the fields of fiction, creative memoir and theatre, from the physical, oral and performance texts of the First Nations peoples and works by convicts in Newcastle’s penal colony, through narratives colonial era and the twentieth century, the city’s industrial era, to the present. The creative outcome of this PhD is her linked story novel, Fig.