Meet the Toolkits: Fiction 2026 participants
It’s time to say hello to the Toolkits: Fiction participants for 2026!
Facilitated this year by Miriam Webster, Toolkits: Fiction is a 12-week developmental program supporting writers under 30 as they develop their fiction practice and build community through workshops and writing exercises.
A very warm welcome to this year’s cohort! Read about them below:
Liana Black
Liana Black (she/her) writes at the vertex of love and angst. Writer, editor, queer advocate, and sports communications professional, her creative writing has been published by Guardian Australia, the AFL, and the Australian Writers’ Centre. She was highly commended for Faber Academy, one of three shortlisted for the Kat Muscat Fellowship, and is the founder of Sugarbowl.ink, a writers’ residency coming soon to Queensland. Her current work THE LOVE OF THE GAME, a gritty literary novel about the life, love, and grief of an in-the-closet AFL player, will be on submission mid–late 2026.
Lhotse Collins
Lhotse Collins (she/her) a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on place based anti-colonial research. Working across installation, performance, creative writing and public programs, she is most often preoccupied with myth, story, history, counter-archives, the otherwise and water. In 2025, Lhotse was a student at the Postnatural Institute, and graduated with an honours in Fine Art from Victorian College of the Arts in 2021. She grew up on Yuin Country by the sea and now lives in Naarm on Wurundjeri Country.
Julia Faragher
Julia Faragher (she/her) is a writer living in Melbourne/Naarm. She won the Open Short Story Competition and the Keith Carroll Award from the Boroondara Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing. She is currently a PhD student and Cécile Parrish Memorial Scholar in Creative Writing at Monash University.
Ariana Haghighi
Ariana Haghighi (she/her) is an emerging literary critic and writer with proud origins in student journalism. She has reviewed books for Meanjin and Aniko Press and her short story about a Belgian sweetmaker won the 2025 USU Creative Awards, the ceremony for which she didn’t attend because she assumed being shortlisted was a mistake. Her Honours thesis focused on parallels between ancient Indian epics and diasporic literature and she believes all Indian storytelling is informed by magic.
Samantha Haran
Samantha Haran (she/her) is an Eelam Tamil writer, researcher, organiser and community radio maker based on unceded Dharug land. She is the Production Manager at the community radio show Race Matters on fbi radio, and a current Masters candidate at UNSW Law & Justice. Her words appear in Vogue India, Teen Vogue, Cordite Poetry Review and PAPER Magazine, amongst others.
Elizabeth Ives
Liz Ives (they/them) is a realist fiction writer, bartender, digital marketer and aspiring hospitality journalist who lives and works on the lands traditionally owned by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. Their work has been published in Babyteeth journal. Their writing is concerned with the grey areas of morality and reality, and tries always to describe the messiness of being alive as truthfully as possible.
Elizabeth Lee
Elizabeth Lee (she/her) is an emerging writer, student radiographer, and flightless bird enthusiast living on Yugambeh Country. She loves writing (and reading) queer young adult fiction and surrealist pieces. In her craft, Elizabeth seeks to thread an urban pulse through the themes of family, regret, and feeling out of place in the only world you know.
Georgina Maxine
Georgina Maxine (she/her) is a Queensland writer, originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands, whose work focuses on queer identities and self-worth. She is published in The Suburban Review and the anthology Queersland. She is currently writing a dark academia fantasy novel, Hollowed, that explores the impact of sex-obsessed societies on asexual individuals and was highly commended by Varuna in 2025.
Hannah Vesey
Hannah Vesey (she/her) is an autistic chick who really likes those packets of spicy two-minute noodles. Her work explores nature, anxiety disorders and chosen family. She’s working on a novel about a music controversy and another novel about a religious cult. In her spare time, you can find her hanging out with her psychologist.
Bridget Webster
Bridget Webster (they/she) lives and makes on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Her writing has been awarded Island's Nature Writing Prize, shortlisted for Overland's Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and awarded an Emerging Poet Prize by Liquid Amber Press. Their poetry, fiction and essays have been featured in Meanjin, Island, Jacaranda, Liquid Amber Press anthologies, and elsewhere.
About the facilitator:
Miriam Webster writes and teaches fiction, essays and poetry in and around Naarm/Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in publications like Aniko Magazine, Griffith Review, HEAT, Island, Overland, The Sydney Review of Books, The Suburban Review, swim meet lit mag and certain zines. Her first book, a collection of short stories called The Slip, was published by Aniko Press in 2025. She is currently working on a novel as part of a PhD in Creative Writing.
Learn more about Toolkits here.
Watch Miriam Webster’s conversation with Patrick Marlborough as part of Toolkits: Fiction 2026.
Interested in participating in Toolkits? An annual Express Media membership lets you access our full range of programs. You’ll also be among the first to hear about upcoming Toolkits streams via our community e-Newsletter.
Toolkits is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.