WORD CATEGORY
Guian Balan
Of Rondalla Street and Ghosts
Writer Statement
Of Rondalla Street and Ghosts is a meditation on memory, displacement, and the speculative lives we abandon when we leave a place behind. Through interwoven recollections and imagined futures, the poem explores the emotional residue of a childhood home or a past self. Rondalla Street represents both a real location and an allegorical terrain, haunted by what might have been—an observation of cultural longing. The poem intersects nostalgia and estrangement, where distance distorts and deepens affection, and where memory begins to mythologise both the self and the setting.
Bio
Guian Balan is an emerging artist and writer based on Dharug land. Working across photography, moving image, and creative writing, her practice explores the intersection of diverse art disciplines.
She is currently developing projects that expand on her interest in archives, poetry,and non-linear storytelling, and continues to engage in collaborative and community-based initiatives.
Arwen Beaumont-Lee
Sungazing
Writer Statement
Sungazing explores the tension between symbolic order and pre-verbal bliss, casting jealousy as a metaphysical longing. Through dissonant communion and sensory disorientation, the piece grapples with gendered alienation, the maternal gaze, and narcissistic injury, as its narrator yearns for a formless, luminous state inaccessible within language, ritual, or human connection.
Bio
I study education, majoring in English. I've been writing stories since I was a little kid. I find it much easier to convey my thoughts and feelings by writing them down as opposed to speaking. I like to blend fiction and non-fiction in my work, making the reader guess what parts are real or made-up. I started sharing my work for the first time last year, and it's been really gratifying to see my creative ideas out in the world.
Rosanna Chim
When Did You Say You’re Leaving
Writer Statement
This experimental, fragmentary piece of autofiction focuses on the role of migrant parents as a cultural anchor, describing my disconnection from Hong Kong heritage after the loss of my father. The narrator struggles with grief, grasping at mythical stories and culture as a coping mechanism.
Highlighted text between words reflects the narrator’s obsessive indulgence in fictional realms within the world around them. Memories of my father and his expressions of love are intertwined with classical Chinese literature, Journey to the West and cultural practices of Mien Shiang—a method of analysing facial features— central to my relationship and retelling of my father.
Bio
I’m a postgraduate creative writing student with a keen interest in Hong Kong and diasporic identity. I’ve been lucky enough to serve as editor for both PULP Magazine and USyd Anthology. I’ll never say no to yum cha, and I regularly dream about egg waffles! I’m always interested in reading prose on cultural heritage and if you’d like to share a story, you’ll likely find me in the PULP basement dungeon of the Wentworth Building.
Juneau Choo
Un-Authorise Conduct
Writer Statement
My work is a response to the University bringing in new anti-protest policies, a response that is itself a breach of the University's Public Comment and Social Media Policy 2025 because it promotes "unauthorised conduct." It politicises queer art and makes artistic queer politics, emphasising the protest in LGBTQIA+ pride.
Bio
My name is Juneau (she/they) and I am a Malaysian transfemme settler living on unceded and occupied Wangal country. I believe in Indigenous sovereignty, queer liberation, asylum seeker and refugee justice, and a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
Ariana Haghighi
Syrup inside
Writer Statement
Set in the Belgian town of Ghent, Syrup inside explores the malleability of our selfhood and how we choose to form relationships. It questions whether we should capitalise on surprise to invite connection into our lives.
Bio
Ariana Haghighi is a passionate student journalist, editing PULP Magazine and Honi Soit, and emerging literary critic, with publications in Meanjin and Overland.
M. K. Han
Open Learning Environment
Writer Statement
Open Learning Environment is about the absurdity of university student life and the hilarity of loss.
Bio
M. K. Han is a student/teacher of Latin/English who currently loves "Challengers" (2024) and frozen yoghurt chains.
Kuyili Karthik
Coming home, crushing petals underfoot
Writer Statement
A collection of three poems chronicling returns home to Chennai, South India. Reflections on the insufficiency of language to bridge the gaps of physical separation, and reflections on the losses of Tamil language and the oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka. I am united to them in language. We will find the words that are roads to freedom.
Bio
Kuyili studies Comparative Literature at the University of Sydney. She is searching for words to express the aporias of alienation, migration, memory, and meaning.
Chantel Khammo
Chameleon
Writer Statement
Chameleon is a piece portraying a woman’s metamorphosis into a chameleon, symbolising her growing detachment from herself and the world as she blends into her surroundings. The poem evokes the ache of invisibility, existing unnoticed, and loneliness.
Bio
I am a first-year Psychology and Criminology student at the University of Sydney. Poetry is my way of expressing my thoughts and emotions- both to others and myself.
Angela Lloyd-Jones
Uber Eats
Writer Statement
Uber Eats is about being alone after being with someone for a long time.
Bio
Angela is a student who writes boring stuff for work and fun stuff for play. She has been published in the Joanne Burns Microlit Anthology and also won the Olga Masters Youth Short Story Award.
Mussel Triptych
Sagar Nair
Writer Statement
Inspired by the triptych art form, this piece blends poetry and prose to depict surreal images.
Bio
Sagar Nair was shortlisted for the 2025 Honi Soit Writing Competition. His work is published in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 100 Word Story, The Shore Poetry, Voiceworks, The Suburban Review, and elsewhere.
Aidan Pollock
My Gay Father
Writer Statement
This piece is about love and misery. How does one exist in a world of pain? As a helper? Viewer? Sufferer? I have an inheritance of my father's trauma and the trauma of my gay community. I trundle along tracks of pain questioning if I can re-route the path, or if I'm just discovering old wounds anew.
Bio
I am a learner in a world of things to learn.
Writing on stolen Gadigal Country.
Harper Ross
Everything, everything
Writer Statement
Sometime around 2120, a young woman applies for an internship. Clandestine “stay-behind” operations of cultural warfare — now ongoing for over a century — have cemented themselves into political hierarchies across the globe. Knowledge is assured. Meaning is secured. In the future, everyone works for the ABC.
Everything, everything is a story without the time to consider what larger sociological effects a total, dominating system of knowledge might have on us. Instead, it just wants to know how that might feel, even for one moment. Its title is a reference to a live album released on September 4, 2000 by Underworld.
Bio
Harper Ross is a real person that lives in Sydney, Australia.
When Harper isn't working, they do real things, like drink real coffee, experience real moments, etc, etc.
Bineeta Saha
Why Don’t Universities Have Recess
Writer Statement
Why Don’t Universities Have Recess? resists the explanatory impulse often demanded of diaspora writers, refusing to perform cultural legibility for a presumed White audience. Between schoolyard insults, confessional humour and prayers to unlikely gods, it maps how language, food and failure shape belonging in so-called Australia.
Bio
Hi, I’m Bee – a third-year Arts and Social Work student. I’m a food writer and enjoy writing creative prose that explores diaspora, memory and intimacies of the everyday. I’m interested in work that resists neat conclusions and centres complexity, contradiction, and the mythic as much as the silly.
Natalie Susack
Language Lessons
Writer Statement
This project is about my inability to speak my mother(’s) tongue. When I travelled to Croatia and found myself a foreigner in my family’s country, I was struck by a deep sense of mourning for a language I never spoke. When I began taking a Croatian course alongside my writing practice, this project provided a space to draw these two languages together, and to understand each word in a new context.
Bio
Natalie Susak is an Australian poet and PhD student of Croatian descent. She was the recipient of the 2025 Varuna Poetry Flagship Fellowship and the 2024 Free the Verse nature poetry prize. Her recent work has appeared in Cordite, Island, AVENUE and The University of Sydney Anthology.
Joshua Woo
Lying About The Someone I Was
Writer Statement
Lying About the Someone I Was is about a job interview that goes wrong.
Bio
Joshua Tristan Woo is completing his Honours in English.