Word Category

Arwen Beaumont-Lee
The Graveyard Bunny

Writer Statement

A meditation on memory and thresholds, this work traces a cemetery’s looping roads to reveal how the living and dead coexist. Rabbits, crypts and rain expose constant motion beneath stillness, suggesting that grief, like driving in circles, is a practice of returning, noticing, and being remade.

Bio

Arwen Beaumont-Lee is a Sydney-based writer whose work moves between memoir, observation and the uncanny. She explores memory, ritual and the quiet strangeness of everyday places, drawing on interdisciplinary research and lived experience to create atmospheric, reflective narratives.

Sarea Bhar
the debt, my haverst

Writer Statement

This poem engages with themes of farmer suicide and rural debt in India.

Dedicated to the farmers of India lost to a crisis of debt and despair. This poem traces one man's descent - the tractor he buys for salvation becoming the harvest of his ruin. Written with Punjab close to my heart, where this crisis remains painfully present.

Bio

Sarea Bhar is an aspiring writer with a deep passion for storytelling. An avid reader, she believes in the power of words to illuminate hidden struggles and connect communities across distance. This is her first piece exploring themes close to her heritage and the world around her.

Jesse Carpenter
Worms

Writer Statement

Worms is concerned primarily with interstitial spaces and their phenomenology. What does life look like and feel like between sexes, between waking and dreaming? It is beautiful when the world dissolves its own boundaries, those porous, shifting, and transient things.

Bio

Jesse studies Mathematics & Philosophy, and they are currently on exchange in Berlin. Their poetry, essays, and fiction have been published in Booker, PULP, Honi Soit, and their short story The Golem won the Muse Magazine writing competition for prose fiction.

Rose Cooke
Didioning

Writer Statement

Didioning is a satirical piece that pokes fun at of the art, the artist and the audience. It is a mediation on class and the assumptions we make about one another.

Bio

Rose Cooke is a final-year Arts Student majoring in English and Sociolegal studies. She has a keen interest in working class stories and also likes just hanging out.

Sophia Du
Mallorca in Turbulence

Writer Statement

These pieces sit at the intersection of the sacred and the profane — exploring belief, desire, and degradation as forms of the same hunger. Across prose and poetry, I'm interested in the tension between cosmic scale and bathetic reality: what it means to seek transcendence in grief, in ritual, in the bodies and bad habits we keep.

Bio

Sophia is a fourth-year Bachelor of Arts student at the University of Sydney, writing poetry and prose about God, the cosmos, and other things she doesn't fully believe in. She is working on it.

Haidar Faeeh
The City Beneath

Writer Statement

Through Hamra Street, this piece reflects on memory, place and return. By revisiting the same street four decades apart, I wanted to explore how cities change without losing themselves, and how people carry fragments of places with them long after they leave.

Bio

Haidar Faeeh is a first-year Commerce and Laws student and scholar at the University of Sydney. Alongside his studies, he works as a cadet accountant. His writing explores memory, place, family and cultural identity, with a particular interest in how cities preserve stories across generations.

Charlotte Ghannoum
Clovelly / Slip

Writer Statement

My diptych of poems Clovelly and Slip explore the ephemeral and unpredictable nature of relationships through the lens of nature. I was inspired by the organic movements of water, particularly how waves ebb and flow. I was very interested in how these patterns in nature mimic the same erosions that can be found in human relationships, whether platonic or romantic.

Bio

Charlotte Ghannoum is a fourth year Media/Communications and Ancient History major who in her spare time enjoys exploring the fictional side of literary endeavours. She often writes in the personal essay and poetry formats and explores her own lived experience through these mediums, and is inspired by organic materials and unchanging movements found in nature and the ways that this mimics human experience.

Ariana Haghighi
Before the Bench

Writer Statement

Before the Bench explores the concerning use of distorted psychological research as evidence in courtrooms to discredit victim-survivors. Through fiction, I enter the psyche of expert witnesses who participate in this 'trend' to better understand how this harm is inflicted.

Bio

Ariana Haghighi is a final year law student who was awarded First Class in her English Literature Honours in 2024 for a thesis on diasporic Indian myth retelling. She is an emerging writer and literary critic, published in Meanjin, Aniko Press and Overland. Her career has proud origins in student journalism, as she edited PULP and Honi Soit, the birthplaces of her love of writing.

Maxwell Han
The Alien

Writer Statement

The Alien is about a child encountering something strange on a holiday. It tries to evoke the feeling when childhood is disrupted, when you realise you might not be for this world.

Bio

M K Han is a lover of writing and reading who is currently studying an Honours in Latin.

Kalliste Hardy
Dog Years

Writer Statement

This piece is an ode to an unreachable you, a small skeleton of memory, ecology, and a feeling still half-rotted. It assembles (our/my) debris into a correspondence that can never be sent, mapping the ghost-geography of intimacy that outlives its witness.

Bio

Kalliste is a Greek-Australian writer living on unceded Gayamaygal land, currently pursuing a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. Her work has been published in Voiceworks, miniMAG, Notch, and more. She is currently working on a novella about three glaciologists navigating a potentially hallucinated horror on an Arctic expedition.

Emma Hooton
Joanna

Writer Statement

Joanna is a reflective creative non-fiction piece about my Aunty that employs a playful, humorous voice to examine family genealogies, memory and the gradual recognition of human fragility.

Bio

Emma is a law and Italian student whose work has been published in River Theory magazine and zines by Dipytich and Rambler magazine. She writes poetry and creative non-fiction, sharing feverishly strange but sentimental stories that she collects from family, friends, and strangers at bars and the back corners of concerts.

Kuyili Karthik
No Worries

Writer Statement

This story is a patchwork of memories that are lived, loaned, found, and bequeathed. Addiction is a very human thing.

Bio

Kuyili Karthik is a writer from Chennai, India living on Gadigal land. She studies Philosophy and International and Comparative Literary Studies.

Sung Hee Lee
Appa... Eomma...

Writer Statement

Appa… Eomma… is a story through my father’s perspective, inevitably entwined with how I hope and wish he sees me and reflecting on how I’ve become like my parents. I want to capture the unspoken and the longing to speak and how so much is held within our inner monologue.

Bio

Sung Hee is a person who has just learnt about life and is continuing to learn.
She is excited to experience the good and bad of life, and to share it with others.

Lakai Tungafasi
the Seeds we Seldom Sow

Writer Statement

It's in our nature to consume, and because of this, the billionaire class have created a world where we consume cheap distractions and faulty product. Yet we gobble it up and fight with one another instead of rightfully targeting our anger. This vulgar belles-lettres talks about this, encouraging big change.

Bio

Tungafasi is an Australian author, businessman, entrepreneur, content creator, painter, and former actor and model. His story Elderberry was published in the 2025 USYD Anthology ‘A Little Better Elsewhere.’ He is the 2024 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Success Award Recipient, and a Business School Faculty Ambassador.

Wen Zhong
So, Who Am I?

Writer Statement

So, Who Am I? explores identity formation through reflective storytelling. It positions uncertainty as a necessary space for growth, arguing that navigating the unknown is far more meaningful than arriving at a definition.

Bio

An education student with a passion for making a difference, they turn their curiosity into writing. Through their work, they explore the human experience and inspire readers to see the endless possibilities life has to offer.