This residency exchange was initiated in 2019 is a partnership between Cove Park and Varuna the National Writers’ House of Australia, and is generously supported by The Bridge Awards.

We are delighted to confirm that the residencies this year have been awarded to the Scotland-based author and Cove Park Associate Nicola White, and to the Australia-based physician and writer Leah Kaminsky. Nicola will be traveling to Australia for her residency in September and October this year, and we look forward to hosting Leah at Cove Park throughout August.

In its inaugural year, the residency was awarded to the Scotland-based author Victoria Mackenzie and to the Austria-based author Roanna Gonsalves. Varuna’s International Writers Residency Programme is partially funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and we are grateful to these organisations for their generous support.

Residency Exchange 2022: Writers’ Biographies

Leah Kaminsky is a physician and award-winning writer. Her debut novel The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize. The Hollow Bones won the International Book Awards in both Literary Fiction & Historical Fiction categories and the Best Book Awards for Literary Fiction. She is the author of ten books and her third novel, Doll’s Eye, will be released by Penguin Random House Australia in 2023. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA.

Nicola White is the author of three novels. The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize and was chosen as one of the best debuts of 2014 by Val McDermid. A prequel to The Rosary Garden, A Famished Heart, was published in 2020 by an imprint of Serpent’s Tail, Viper Books, and The Burning Boy completed the trilogy this year. All three books are set in Ireland in the 1980s.
 
She has also published numerous non-fiction texts on art, culture and memoir, including longform essays in The Dublin Review. She was a Scottish Literature resident at Cove Park in 2014, and is a current associate.
 
She is a past recipient of Scottish Book Trust’s New Writer Award, and a former Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. She previously worked as an art curator and as a documentary maker with the BBC. She was born in Dublin, grew up in New York and Dublin, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Image: Nicola White (photography by Ruth Clark)