Monikka Eliah

TDTF Writer-in-Residence Monikka Eliah is an Assyrian writer and performer. She participated in NToP’s Page to Stage program, CuriousWorks Breakthrough Screen Writing Program, Netflix and Co-curious’ On The Brightside Screenwriting Program and STC’s Rough Draft. Her work features in SBS Voices, Runway Journal, Southerly, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and The Saturday Paper. She received Southlands Breakthrough Award 2018, Wheeler Centre Playwright Hot Desk Fellowship 2020, Ausco Resilience Grant 2021, Wheeler Center Next Chapter Award 2022, runner up in the SBS Emerging Writers Competition 2022 and Creative Australia grant 2024. She is working on her debut novel.

Daniel Alwan

TDTF Writer-in-Residence Daniel Alwan - A queer Australian-Lebanese writer and over-thinker based on unceded Gadigal land. His short stories have been shortlisted for the 2022 Furphy Literary Award and published in the 2023 KYD New Australian Fiction anthology. He holds an MA in English from the University of Sydney, where he also works as an English language teacher. He will be working on a collection of short stories, and a debut novel.

Orlando Silver

TDTF Writer-in-Residence Orlando Silver (he/they) is a trans queer writer living and working on Darug and Gundungurra lands. He is a playwright, fiction writer and poet. Orlando often focuses on the intersections of desire, transgender identities and embodiment. He is the author of the plays “Soft Daddy” (2024) and “Escape Velocity” (2003). He is the editor of the kink anthology “I Write the Body” (Kith Books). His new anthology “Take it Outside” is due for publication in early 2025 through his new imprint, Incision Press. He will be working on his new novel, “Scratch”.

Norman Saadi Nikro

TDTF Writer-in-Residence: Norman Saadi Nikro

Norman Saadi Nikro is a writer and academic of Australian and Lebanese background. His books include The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon (2012), Milieus of ReMemory: Relationalities of Violence, Trauma, and Voice (2019), Nafssiya: Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism (2024), and is co-editor of the volume Insidious Trauma in the Production of Eastern African Literatures and Cultures (2024). He resides in Sydney as an independent scholar and writer. He will be working on his memoir.

Peter Polites

TDTF Lead Artist-in-Residence:

Peter Polites is a writer of Greek descent from Western Sydney who has written and performed pieces all over Australia. In 2020 he won the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Fiction and in 2021 he was the ACT Writer in Residence at UNSW Canberra. His novels include Down the Hume (2017), The Pillars (2019), which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Multicultural Award, and God Forgets About the Poor (2023). Peter’s short stories and essays have been published in Overland, Seizure, and Sydney Review of Books. He was the co-writer of the award-winning web-series, ILUVUBUT, and of Urban Theatre Projects’ production, Home Country, which premiered in the 2017 Sydney Festival.