Inspired by last weekend's True Story festival? Here are some writing opportunities at the South Coast Writers Centre

• SCWC Emerging & Established Writers Group Retreat at Bundanon

Monday 28 April – Sunday 4 May 2025

This week-long retreat at Bundanon Homestead will allow six emerging or established NSW South Coast writers to focus on developing or completing works. While participants will be primarily spending their days working on individual projects, this retreat is also designed as a supportive group retreat that will enable writers to develop as a writing community.

Brooke Boland, a 2024 Bundanon attendee, recently launched her book Gulp, Swallow: Essays on Change. She said about the retreat: “This residency offered the solitude a writer craves, and the courage an emerging writer needs.”

Applications close 15 December, apply and read feedback from 2024 attendees via the SCWC website.

• SCWC & Merrigong Playwrights Program

February – November 2025

The 2025 SCWC / Merrigong Playwrights Program aims to create a space where writers are encouraged to develop their writing projects among a safe and supportive group of peers. The purpose is to foster community with a group of writers, give them space to write and think about their practice, and to share work. The group will meet monthly on Saturdays either at Coledale Community Hall or at a performance in one of Merrigong’s venues. The group will be convened by Tom Peach, playwright, ex-president of Stanwell Park Arts Theatre and an alumnus of the Merrigong Playwrights Program.

Applications close 15 December.

• SCWC Screenwriting Program

February – December 2025

The Screenwriting Group focuses on the craft of screenwriting for drama. As in 2024, industry veteran Graham Thorburn is looking to form a small group of mutually supportive writers with some experience in writing (though not necessarily either fiction or screenplays) interested in writing a first draft of their own feature length screenplay over the course of 2025. Although Graham’s process has strong theoretical underpinnings, it is at heart an intensely practical step-by-step process. At the beginning of the year the group will explore the elements that underpin a character-driven screenplay, and then each participant will be encouraged to develop their own script, and to share their developing script and their journey with the group.

Workshops will be held fortnightly on Thursday nights from 6:30pm at Coledale. Applications open soon. Register for the Screenwriting Program Info Night on Thursday, 5 December.

2025 SCWC Poetry Award

The SCWC 2025 Poetry Award invites poets to submit poems responding to the theme ‘shapeshifter’. Judged by esteemed poet Judith Beveridge, winner of the 2023 ACU Prize for Poetry. All winning entries will be published in the South Coast Writers Centre’s 2025 Anthology.

The Award is run in association with the Wollongong Art Gallery exhibition Shape Shifters, an innovative retrospective of Australian collage.

Submissions open 7 December 2024 – 2 March 2025. Register for our Poetry Award workshop with 2024 winner Jen Saunders on Saturday, 11 January 2025.