Roseville’s Shankari Nadanachandran has been named NSW Writers’ Fellow for 2018/19, one of five recipients awarded with a Create NSW Artform Fellowship.
Ms Nadanachandran will receive $30,000 to support her personal, creative and career advancement, as part of a NSW Government combined funding total of $150,000.
Jonathan O’Dea, Member for Davidson noted that, “This is incredibly exciting news for Shankari. I am delighted that she has received this prestigious Create NSW Fellowship and look forward to the positive impact on her literary career.”
As NSW Writers’ Fellow, Shankari Nadanachandran will undertake a series of activities, including travelling to Sri Lanka, completing her new sequel, The Phantom Heart and developing her new work, Chai Time at Jesmond. She will also attend training/residencies, attend literary festivals to showcase her work, and begin collating research for online access by diaspora and others.
“Through their Fellowship opportunities, our recipients are set to propel their careers through a series of mentorships, residencies and collaborations,” Minister for the Arts, Don Harwin said.
“Ms Nadanachandran joins an incredible list of past Fellows including Jonathan Jones, Andrea James, Khaled Sabsabi and Cathy Craigie.”
Shankari was raised in Canberra and spent a decade in London working as a social justice lawyer before moving to Sydney in 2010. Since then, she has researched Sri Lanka’s civil war to inform her first book, Song of the Sun God, released in January 2017 through South Asian writers’ publishing house Perera-Hussein. She also published her second book, The Barrier, in June 2017 through Pan Macmillan Australia.
In 2017, Shankari was awarded an Early Career Writer Grant, administered by the NSW Writers’ Centre on behalf of Create NSW. This funding enabled her to undertake a vital research trip to Sri Lanka to complete The Phantom Limb, the first in the ‘Ellie Ryder series’, which is currently with publishers.
For more information about the author, please visit http://shankarichandran.com/
