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Michelle Cahill Michelle Cahill i(A5849 works by)
Also writes as: Michelle Carter
Born: Established: 1964 ;
Gender: Female
Heritage: Indian
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BiographyHistory

Michelle Cahill is a Goan-Anglo-Indian writer. She spent her childhood in Kenya and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia. A Sydney resident, she graduated from the University of Sydney in Medicine and has worked as a part-time General Practitioner. In 2020, she completed her Doctorate of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong.

Cahill's poetry has been published in journals in Australia, the USA and the United Kingdom as well as in numerous online journals and her essays have been published in Sydney Review of Books, The Weekend Australian, Southerly and Australian Women Writers. Cahill's short story 'Duende' won the 2014 Kingston Writing School Hilary Mantel International Short Story Competition, worth £3000 and judged by Hilary Mantel. She was shortlisted in the Wasafari New Writing Prize and placed second in the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Cahill's first published collected work of poetry The Accidental Cage won Best First Book at the IP Picks Awards in 2006, and her selected fiction Letter to Pessoa won the NSW Premier's Literary Award 'Glenda Adams Award for New Writing', and was longlisted for the ASL Gold Medal in 2017 and shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Award in 2017. 

In 2019, Cahill was the recipient of an Australia Council Grant of $30,000.

In addition to works individually indexed on AustLit, see Notes for further works.

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • In addition to works individually indexed on AustLit, Michelle Cahill has also published the following:

    • 'Her Right Hand Married to Jane Eyre', Kill Your Darlings 25 (April 2016).
    • 'On Poetry and Things Left Unsaid', Spike [Meanjin blog], 16 June 2016. Available: https://meanjin.com.au/blog/michelle-cahill-on-her-poetry-and-things-left-unsaid/

Personal Awards

2021 shortlisted Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest for 'Dark'.
2020 winner Red Room Poetry Fellowship
2019 recipient Australia Council Grants, Awards and Fellowships

Literature Arts Projects For Individuals and Groups $30,000.00

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Letter to Pessoa Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2016 10166210 2016 selected work short story

'Letter to Pessoa is the first collection of short stories by award-winning Goan-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. It is an imaginative tour de force, portraying the experiences of a whole range of characters, including a scientist, a cat and a young Indian female version of Joseph Conrad, in settings across the world, from Barcelona to Capetown, Boston to Chiang Mai, Kathmandu to Kraków. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title, and who created as many as seventy versions of himself, Cahill displays a remarkable inventiveness, making distant landscapes and situations come alive, in compelling detail, as they express the fear and longing, obsession and outrage, of the people caught up in them.

'Displaying its awareness of the power of writing to create realities, the collection also includes a number of fictions in letter form, to Jacques Derrida, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet and Margaret Atwood – and to JM Coetzee, from his character Melanie Isaacs. ' (Publication summary)

2017 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Australian Short Story Collection - Steele Rudd Award
2017 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
2017 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
Borges and I 2015 single work short story
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 374 2015; (p. 46-51)
2015 second place ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
Hemisphere i "All morning the metaphysicians surmise. I leave my room", 2014 single work poetry
— Appears in: Dazzled : The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize 2014; (p. 102-103)
2014 longlisted The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize
Last amended 1 Nov 2021 07:58:45
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