Announcing the 2025 CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellows

Thanks to everyone who applied to the 2025 round of the CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowship. It was one of the most competitive rounds in the Fellowship’s history, in terms of both the number and the quality of the applications we received. After some lengthy and agonising decisions by the judges, we’re thrilled to announce the 2025 recipients:

Susie Anderson is a Wergaia/Wemba Wemba writer of prose and poetry whose practice uncovers layers of place and culture. Working for a decade in the Australian arts sector as a digital content manager has imbued her writing with a strong interest in visual art and curatorial practice. Her publications span curatorial text, exhibition reviews, artist interviews, essays, and poetry. Susie’s collection the body country was shortlisted for the 2023 New South Wales and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She is currently working on a novel. 

Damian Maher is a Fellow by Examination at All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently working on the reception of Henry James among moral philosophers. 

Edie Mitsuda is a writer and bookseller, living on unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar. She is currently working on her first novel.

Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer and the editor of THIS ALL COME BACK NOW (UQP 2022), the world’s first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction, which won an Aurealis Award. Mykaela’s debut spec-fic collection ALWAYS WILL BE (UQP 2024) won the David Unaipon Award, was shortlisted for the NSW Literary Award Indigenous Writers Prize, and longlisted for The Stella Prize. Mykaela has won other prizes for fiction, poetry, essays and research, including the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, and the ASAL Rosemary van den Berg Prize for First Nations Criticism. Mykaela is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University researching First Nations speculative fiction.

Dr Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023. His essays, reviews and interviews have been published in the Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, and elsewhere. He is currently working on his first book, a literary history of the rise of creative writing as a tertiary discipline in Australia. 

This round marks the ninth iteration of the fellowship, founded in 2016 to foster diverse, provocative, and original critical voices. We extend our thanks to our guest judges for this year Nick Tapper and Lucy Van, and as always to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for supporting the CA-SRB Emerging Critics Fellowship over the years.