Announcing the recipient of our 2025 Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship

Julia Wakefield who was born and educated in the UK, but her parents were Australian. She began her career illustrating readers and educational publications for UK publishers, and continued to freelance as a writer/illustrator for educational publishers when she moved to Melbourne. She is also a visual artist and printmaker.

After returning to live in the UK for an extended period, Julia finally settled with her family in South Australia, where her father’s ancestors arrived in the 1850s. During the last twenty years she has had many poems for adults published in national journals, online journals and local anthologies. Her own collection, Shifting Viewpoints, was one of three collections published in one volume by Friendly Street Poets Inc. in 2019. She now specialises in writing and teaching haiku and other Japanese art forms.

In 2009 Littlefox Press in Melbourne published A Disastrous Honeymoon, Julia’s illustrated sequel to Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. Julia’s first middle grade novel, The Magpie’s Song, unpublished as yet, was one of twelve shortlisted projects for the Queensland Writers’ Centre 2022 Publishable award. She won second prize in the 2022 NSW Writers Unleashed competition for a picture book manuscript, and in 2020 she was awarded a mentorship with US writer/illustrator Brian Lies. Julia is currently working on the illustrations for two of her own picture book manuscripts.

Julia will use the time granted to her for the Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship to undertake further research and complete a working draft of a middle grade novel that describes, among many other things, the historical meeting between Matthew
Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in Encounter Bay.