UQP Mentorship Prize for Under-represented Writers Shortlist

UQP is delighted to announce the shortlist for the inaugural UQP Mentorship Prize for Under-represented Writers.

• Tongue: Essays on language, identity and being an international student in Australia by Suri Matondkar [non-fiction]
• Those Who Believe by SD Munawara [fiction]
• Cusp by Daniel Ray [fiction]
• Nightjaws by Carielyn Tunion [fiction]
• Heart Constellations by Cat Yen [non-fiction

The prize was judged by Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Siang Lu, acclaimed author, journalist and academic Sarah Malik and UQP Publishing Director Madonna Duffy.

The judges had the following to say about the shortlisted works:

‘We were deeply impressed by the strength, quality and distinctiveness of the entries. So many diverse life experiences and imaginative stories were represented in the pool of over 200 entries. It was a challenge to arrive at a shortlist, as so many entries were deserving of broader and deeper attention. Congratulations to the five shortlisted writers; your work has shone brightly in a stellar first year of this prize.’

Two winners will be announced in November and will each receive:

• Prize money of $5000
• A residency at UQP’s office at The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, including:
  1. Return flights and accommodation in Brisbane for the residency (if required)
  2. Online or in-person sessions with an experienced writing mentor matched with the winning author
  3. Editorial mentoring with a UQP editor
  4. A professional development session with senior UQP staff on marketing, publicity, rights and sales
• Consideration of the final manuscript by a UQP publisher with an option to publish the work

About the writers:

Suri Matondkar is a writer and doctoral student interested in language and identity. She was a 2024 Hot Desk Fellow at the Wheeler Centre and was also awarded the 2025 Eric Dark flagship fellowship by Varuna, The National Writers’ House. Her work can be found in Cordite, Kill Your Darlings, Island and Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series.

SD Munawara is a Somali-Australian writer. Her fiction writing is concerned with faith, community, and the everyday practice of Islam in this country. She was most recently shortlisted for the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and is currently writing a short story collection.

Daniel Ray lives between Queanbeyan and Naarm. He is interested in the emptiness and intensity particular to adolescence and the entanglements of desire, time and mental illness. His writing is published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, Short Fiction, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Island, Westerly, Overland, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Sunder, The Suburban Review and elsewhere. Daniel is a PhD student at La Trobe University, researching queerness and affect.

Carielyn Tunion / 林嘉蓮 (she/they) is a writer, videopoet, educator, and cultural worker with a background in film studies and media arts. Carielyn is interested in radical nostalgia, revolutionary romanticism, and the Tropical Gothic from a critical ‘Filipino’ and Hong Kong diaspora perspective. Carielyn's writing and creative practice is central to her self-expression, places she goes to create, recreate, destroy, and regenerate - where she can write and rewrite herself and the stories for which she is a conduit. Carielyn's work explores themes of yearning, radical nostalgia, ritual, and folklore through a postcolonial, diasporic perspective.

Cat Yen unearths the complexity of gendered, working-class and migrant experiences of everyday life in her writing. She captures intricate life-worlds to offer readers with lived experience of disadvantage solidarity and understanding, while representing minority experiences in empowering narratives of potential. For readers without such lived experience, Cat hopes her writing stretches their capacity to imagine and empathise with the lives of others. Proudly the daughter of factory and retail workers with no creative credentials, Cat is a data analyst for her day job. Cat's first piece of creative writing about the interiority of her mother, a cashier at a $2 store, won the SBS Emerging Writers' Competition in 2021. Cat is currently an inaugural Writer Resident at Abbotsford Convent and was a 2024 Hot Desk Fellow at the Wheeler Centre.

Congratulations to the shortlisted writers.

For more information, contact UQP Marketing & Publicity Manager Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au.