Media Release 6 June 2025
The Michael King Writers Centre Announces Recipients of International Exchange With Australia
New Zealand writer Ingrid Horrocks and Australian writer Fiona Murphy have been announced as the recipients of the 2025 New Zealand-Australia residency exchange, an international residency programme held by Varuna, the Australian National Writers House in collaboration with the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland.
The four-week residency exchange will take place during October and November 2025. Ingrid will work on her debut novel at Varuna and will appear at the Blue Mountains Writers Festival. Fiona will spend her time at Michael King Writers Centre also working on her debut novel, in which she hopes to highlight the flaws and misidentifications made in policing, the justice system, mental health and addictions in Australia that affect marginalised people. In addition to writing, she hopes to research deaf rights in New Zealand.
Both writers’ centres said ‘We received some truly wonderful applications. The standard of applications for this exchange program was very competitive’.
Wellington based writer Ingrid’screative publications span two decades and a number of genres, including two poetry books, two books of narrative nonfiction, an edited collection on imaginings of place, and now a fiction debut, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, is forth-coming with Te Herenga Waka University Press and University of Queensland Press in 2025/6. Her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, SRB, Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian. Her book, Where We Swim (THWUP and UQP, 2021), was described by Australian Book Review as a “luminous work of wondrous depth.” She was the 2024 CNZ Writer in Residence at the IIML, and in 2025 is teaching online for the Faber Writing Academy at Allen & Unwin. During her residency the novel she will be working on is set in the same world as All Her Lives.
Fiona is an award-winning writer and arts critic based in the Blue Mountains. Her writing about disability, accessibility and the arts has appeared in The Guardian, ABC, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, and The Big Issue. In 2021, her memoir about deafness, The Shape of Sound, was released in Australia, New Zealand, UK and North America. In 2022, it was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted in the Australia Book Industry Awards (ABIA). She is a MacDowell Fellow (2022) and Peter Blazey Fellow (2024).
Chair of the Board of Trustees, Melanee Winder says, ‘The ongoing partnership between the Michael King Writers Centre Trust and Varuna, Australia’s National Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains remains a key highlight in the calendars of both organisations. We’re so excited to see what Ingrid Horrocks achieves during her stay at Varuna and we look forward to welcoming Australian writer Fiona Murphy to the Signalman’s Cottage on Takarunga Mt Victoria later this year’.
For more information on the exchange see Michael King Writers Centre Website.
MEDIA INTERVIEWS
For interviews please contact Michael King Writers Centre Executive Director, Jan McEwen: Mobile 0274 811 567 jan@writerscentre.org.nz