newy.com.au – Hunter Writers’ Centre has announced the winners of its 2026 Grieve Project awards, with selected multimedia works now available in an online gallery ahead of an anthology release on 29 September.
The national storytelling project invites people to explore grief through poetry, prose, music, film, multimedia and visual art. This year’s selected works were curated by Kylie Mirmohamadi and Jodi Vial, with Katarina Lindstrom as associate curator.
The gallery gives audiences access to the multimedia selections, while pre-orders have opened for Grieve Volume 13. The full list of award recipients is available on the centre’s website.
Trudy Hanson, chief executive of the National Association of Loss and Grief (NSW), praised entrants’ courage and generosity in sharing their work. The organisation is the project’s foundation partner.
“Nothing can move us quite so deeply as music, story and art,” Hanson said.
The forthcoming anthology will open with a commissioned story by Julie Janson, a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation in NSW. Her story is based on her Indigenous family history of children given up to the Benevolent Society in the 1860s.
Pettigrew Family Funerals sponsored the commission, which Amy-Lea Pettigrew described as the anthology’s first commissioned work by a First Nations author.
“Julie Janson’s story carries a history that deserves to be heard,” she said.
Alongside the award partners and sponsors, donors making contributions in memory of others support the Grieve Project. It is one of several national literary initiatives run by the Hunter Writers’ Centre, which also organises the Newcastle Poetry Prize and Newcastle Short Story Award.
Grieve Volume 13 is due for release on Tuesday, 29 September, with pre-orders through the centre’s online bookshop.
