Grace Chan – author of the Stella Prize longlisted Every Version of You, has been shortlisted for The Paragraph Fellowship, for her work-in-progress Caretakers!

The Paragraph Fellowship aims to accelerate the production of high-quality literary fiction in Australia by providing emerging and early career writers with $25,000 to advance a work in progress intended for publication. The Fellowship is designed to fill a gap in the ecosystem of financial supports available to emerging and early career writers in the work in progress phase, during which many struggle to find the time to write because they are focused on earning an income from alternative sources such as paid employment. Recent research has shown that the average income of a writer writing in Australia is a mere $18,200 per year.

Chan’s Caretakers for which she has been shortlisted, is about; ‘Moth Leong is a caretaker for humans-in-hibernation on board a migration ship on a decades-long journey. She discovers a strange message written in a code known only to herself and her eight-year-old son, Tide. However, she has no memory of writing the message— and Tide is in hibernation on a different ship. Unsettled, Moth is drawn into memories of her previous life on Earth. With the help of the ship’s mycologist, Fern, Moth deciphers the code to find a camera recording of herself falling off the spaceship. As further revelations unfold, Moth must grapple with the discovery that her life is not truly hers.’

Grace Chan is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. She writes about brains, minds, and space. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Every Version of You, is about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality. It won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards People’s Choice Award and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Going Down Swinging, and many other places. Grace was born in Malaysia and lives in Melbourne. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist.

Congratulations, Grace!