We are delighted to announce the writer taking part in the 2022 residency exchange between Cove Park in Scotland and Varuna, the National Writer’s House in New South Wales, Australia. This residency allows one writer from Scotland to spend a month at Varuna and one writer from Australia to enjoy a month at Cove Park.

The writer selected for the 2022 residency at Varuna in New South Wales is Nicola White. She will be taking up her residency in September and October 2022.

Nicola 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.

“I am both excited and honoured to have been awarded the Cove Park/ Varuna Residency for 2022. Since I first learned about that yellow house in the Blue Mountains, I’ve longed to visit and to write and walk there. Getting the chance to step away from the demands of day-to-day life and completely focus on a new work in this magical and unfamiliar setting is such a gift. My very sincere thanks to The Bridge Awards and the partnership of Cove Park and Varuna for giving me the chance of this amazing journey.”