Mykaela Saunders and Darby Jones named UTS Indigenous Writers' Fellows

The inaugural Copyright Agency-UTS Indigenous Writers' Fellowships for 2026/2027 carry a $15,000 stipend each, plus mentoring and industry networking.

Mykaela Saunders and Darby Jones have been named the inaugural Copyright Agency-UTS Indigenous Writers' Fellows for 2026/2027, the University of Technology Sydney announced on 15 September.

The fellowships are hosted by the UTS Creative Writing program and funded by a grant from the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund. Each fellow receives a $15,000 stipend and time to work on their own writing.

Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She descends from the Dharug people of Western Sydney and belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Her speculative fiction collection Always Will Be (UQP, 2024) won the David Unaipon Award, and This All Come Back Now (UQP, 2022), the First Nations speculative fiction anthology she edited, won an Aurealis Award.

Jones, a queer man with matrilineal ties to the Kamilaroi people of St George in south-west Queensland, writes poetry and creative non-fiction. He is working on a collection of place-based essays about growing up in rural south-west Queensland, and is an editorial assistant at Griffith Review.

The fellowships include mentoring, leadership development, workshops with students, and chances to meet industry representatives, other authors and Indigenous academics and students at UTS. The fellows will also present at the Indigenous Studies conference in October 2026.