Mykaela Saunders

Mykaela Saunders is the author of Always Will Be (2024), which won the David Unaipon Award, and the editor of This All Come Back Now (2022), the Aurealis Award-winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction. Mykaela has won other prizes for fiction, poetry, life writing and research, including the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University. Of Dharug and Lebanese descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community.

Mykaela Saunders reviews ‘Woven: First Nations poetic conversations from the Fair Trade project’ edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

May 2024, no. 464 • 22 April 2024

The concept of Woven, a Fair Trade project from Red Room Poetry, seems simple but the reality is complex: one local First Nations poet is paired with another First Nations poet from another continent, and together they create a poem. This is an ambitious undertaking for the poets themselves and especially for the editor, Māori poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu, who should be commended for stewarding this p ... (read more)

Jolley Prize 2020 (Winner): 'River Story' by Mykaela Saunders

August 2020, no. 423 • 24 July 2020

A crow-shaped shadow flies across the river. Juna knows that her daughter is coming, so the right thing to do is make her favourite feed. Juna casts a fishing net over the river with her mind. The net drifts onto the surface, slips under the skin, and is swallowed by the water. The net descends through the deep water slowly, resting on the bed. River grass unflattens and pokes up between the spac ... (read more)