We are thrilled to announce the judges of the 2022 Alice Sinclair Memorial Writing Competition are Magdalena Ball and Jenny Blackford. Magdalena and Jenny took on this role in 2018 and we are very grateful for their taking time-out from their very busy writing lives for the third time to support the writing community in this way.
Magdalena was born in New York City, where she grew up. After gaining an honours degree in English Literature from the City University of New York, she moved to Oxford in the UK to study English Literature at a postgraduate level. She then migrated to NSW Australia, where she now resides on a rural property with her family. Magdalena is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is the managing editor of Compulsive Reader, a well-respected book review site now in its twenty fourth year. She is the author of a number of novels and poetry books, the most recent of which, The Density of Compact Bone, was published in 2021 by Ginninderra Press. She has won or shortlisted in a number of Australian and international competitions. Find out more about Magdalena at http://www.magdalenaball.com.
Jenny is an award-winning Australian writer and poet. Her poems and stories have appeared in Westerly, Going Down Swinging, Cosmos, Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Science Writing, The School Magazine and many more Australian and international journals and anthologies for adults and children. She won two prizes in the Sisters in Crime Australia Scarlet Stiletto awards 2016 for a murder mystery set in classical Delphi, with water nymphs. Her spidery, ghostly middle-grade novel The Girl in the Mirror (Eagle Books 2019) won the 2020 Davitt Award for Best Children’s Crime Novel. In 2021, Eagle Books published her junior novel Fil and Harry. Pitt Street Poetry published The Duties of a Cat in 2013, The Loyalty of Chickens in 2017, and her third poetry collection, The Alpaca Cantos, in April 2020, just in time for lockdown. Her poetry awards include first place in the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Poetry 2017, the Connemara Mussel Festival Poetry Competition 2016 and the Humorous Verse section of the Henry Lawson awards in 2014 and 2017, as well as third in the prestigious ACU Prize for Literature 2014 and many other placings and commendations. She was awarded the University Medal for her Classics degree from the University of Newcastle. She was one of the principals of small publisher Ebony Books during the 90s. She lives in Newcastle with her philosopher husband and her feline muse. Site: http://www.jennyblackford.com. Twitter: @dutiesofacat.
Lake Macquarie Branch, Fellowship of Australian Writers 