The Sydney Review of Books is delighted to invite applications for the 2026-2027 JUNCTURE Fellowship program for mid-career critics. With the generous support of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, we are offering year-long fellowships, each worth $7,000, to three critics. 

In its first iteration (from 2019 to 2022), the JUNCTURE program produced some of the SRB’s most widely read and influential essays, from Melinda Harvey’s critical pastiche of Rachel Cusk to Jeanine Leane’s clarion call to cultural rigour. Our aims were two-fold: firstly, to help writers sustain their critical practice through a sequence of commissions; and, secondly, to provide a platform for critical excellence and experimentation in Australian writing. 

These remain the motives for rebooting the program, the importance of which has become more apparent as the calibre of critics applying for our Emerging Critics Fellowship continues to rise. While the JUNCTURE and Emerging Critics are separate programs, we have come to see them as complementary facets of the career infrastructure critics need to survive.  

Ensuring the sustainability of critics’ careers also means making critics more versatile contributors to the literary sector. We have thus revised the program to include commissioning and editing new critical work on Australian literature as part of the fellowship process. 

For full details on eligibility and the application process, please visit the callout webpage.

Please direct any queries to the SRB Editor, Dr James Jiang, at editor@sydneyreviewofbooks.com.