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This week’s opportunities
Awards and competitions
Australian Book Review welcomes entries to the 2026 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, worth a total of $10,000, open to all living poets writing in English. Entries must be an original and unpublished single-authored poem of not more than 60 lines. The five shortlisted poems will be published in the January–February 2026 issue of ABR.
Entries close 13 October; learn more and enter.
Grants and funding
First Peoples Tourism Growth Program (Vic)
First Nations-owned and operated businesses, Traditional Owners, Traditional Owner Corporations and Registered Aboriginal Parties are invited to submit expressions of interest for grants of up to $125,000 under a new program by the Victorian Government. The program will support First Nations businesses with training, developing new tourism offerings and helping tourism providers to develop strategies to promote and grow their business.
EOIs close 30 July; learn more and apply.
Callouts
Enlighten Festival 2026 (ACT)
Artists can now submit EOIs for illuminated installations, activations, performances and experiences to be presented on-site at the Festival, while submissions for events to run as part of the Enlighten: Beyond program are also open. An online information session for artist EOIs will be held on 21 July; register here.
Applications for Artist EOI close 21 July; learn more and apply.
Applications for the Enlighten: Beyond EOI close 30 September; learn more and apply.
midsumma festival at Gasworks (Vic)
Gasworks Arts Park is calling for artists and companies to showcase works at the southside hub for midsumma festival. The program spans visual art, drama, comedy, circus, music, theatre and performance art.
Applications close 4 August; learn more and apply.
White Rabbit Gallery Digital Callout
The inaugural WRG Digital Callout invites emerging artists and designers to respond to a theme and create an animation/artwork for the White Rabbit Gallery website landing page. There will be two digital call-outs each year, with each round’s theme aligning with a new exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery. The selected artist receives a $2000 artist’s fee with their work showcased on the WRG website landing page for five months, with access to professional support and guidance from creative agency and design studio, Spring in Alaska.
Entries close 29 August; learn more and enter.
Performance callout for potential sperm donors (Vic)
UK trans performer Krishna Istha is calling for potential sperm donors to participate in this year’s Melbourne Fringe performance, First Trimester (16-18 October). Istha has embarked on a worldwide quest for the ‘perfect’ sperm donor. During the performance, participants join a public conversation with Istha as they answer questions that range from funny to serious. Interviews last 10 minutes live on stage, and the aim is to conduct as many interviews as possible.
Learn more.
Professional development
2025 Arts Leadership Program (SA)
Adelaide Festival Centre’s annual, fully-funded four-day intensive is open for applications, providing tailored leadership guidance and curated workshops. The Program (4-7 November) is designed to support arts industry workers across Australia, New Zealand and Asia – who see themselves as future leaders – in gaining the tools to take their career to the next level. The 2025 program will focus on wellbeing in the arts.
Applications close 4 August; learn more and apply.
Want more? Visit our Opportunities page for more open competitions, prizes, EOIs and call-outs.
This week’s winners
Visual arts
Tim Wilson has taken out the Lennox St Gallery Art Award 2025 with painting, Parts of It, followed by Martin Claydon, Rhys Cousins and Joshua de Gruchy in Highly Commended. Wilson’s work was praised for ‘its sensitivity, depth and painterly restraint’. A total of 21 artists were selected as finalists for the inaugural award, and showcased at Lennox St Gallery until 2 August.
Read: Winners of CIAF Art Awards announced
Shortlisted and finalists
The 2025 Bowness Photography Prize has revealed the finalists who will exhibit at the Museum for Australian Photography (MAPh). The 20th anniversary edition selected 50 works utilising diverse mediums, from glass, metal and paper to screens. Finalists include Hoda Afshar, J Davies, Tamara Dean, Siri Hayes, Shea Kirk, Phuong Nguyen Le, Stanislava Pinchuk and Ali Tahayori. The winner of the prize receives $50,000 and their works will be acquired into MAPh’s collection. One artist will be selected for the $10,000 Wai Tang Commissioning Award and have the opportunity to exhibit a body of work throughout next year’s Bowness Photography Prize session. The exhibition opens at MAPh on 18 September, when the winners will be announced.
From the first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip to politically sharp memoirs on words, wars and law, the shortlist for the 2025 National Biography Award features a diverse range of life writing. This year, the judging panel, comprising Sylvia Martin, Lech Blaine and Eda Gunaydin, have selected six works to shortlist (half of which are debuts) from 103 entries:
- Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars by Abbas El-Zein (Upswell Publishing)
- Detachable Penis: A queer legal saga by Sam Elkin (Upswell Publishing) — debut
- Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled by Kate Fullagar (Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)
- Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths by Matthew Lamb (Penguin Random House Australia) — debut
- John Berger and Me by Nikos Papastergiadis (Giramondo Publishing) — debut
- Madame Brussels: The life and times of Melbourne’s most notorious woman by Barbara Minchinton, with Philip Bentley (La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc)
Read: 20 organisations named under Creative Australia’s new funding platform, Creative Futures Fund
A herd of lively goats, a mother and daughter navigating a complex school system and a final night of revelry in a Melbourne hotel are some of the subjects featured in this year’s Australian Life photography competition. A curated group of 30 finalists were selected from 2280 entries received from across the country. Images making up the over-18s category include:
- A Sea of Horns: Goats engulf themselves in dust as they are rounded up
- Alice and Frieda: A mother and daughter carry the weight of a complex school system
- Weekend Warriors: A woman dances at the Gasometer Hotel one last time, and
- Riley Swanson on the Roma Southern Road: A young drover pauses on a remote stock route.
Images making up the under-18s category include:
- The Quiet Part of Town: A near deserted street in Sydney’s city centre, and
- February Boat Carnival: Organised chaos at a surf boat competition.
All finalists’ works will be exhibited at Sydney’s Customs House Square from 31 July to 24 August, with the winner taking home $10,000.
The 2025 Beaker Street Science Photography Prize has announced finalist works, including the first documentation of a glowing quoll in the Tasmanian wilderness using specialised UV-sensitive techniques. The image by Ben Alldridge reveals the Eastern Quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) biofluorescing in its natural habitat. While many animals are known to glow under ultraviolet light, this is the first time the phenomenon has been recorded in the wild for this endangered species. A total of 12 finalist images have been selected and will exhibit at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) from 6-13 August as part of Beaker Street Festival. Other works capture territorial fish behaviour (Rosa Maria Cañedo-Apolaya, Keep Swimming… This is My Spot), a white-bellied sea eagle stealing prey from a fur seal (Lily Barnett, Lunch Time) and Milky Way over Waterworks Reserve by David Nolan. Winners will be announced at the end of the exhibition.
After a marathon reading of 150-crime books, the judges of the 25th Davitt Awards have picked out 13 for the shortlist, including five adult novels, three non-fiction books, two YA adult novels and three children’s novels. Three of the books in contention are debut works. The shortlist includes Georgia Harper’s What I Would Do to You, where the death penalty has to be enforced by the victim’s family; Shankari Chandran’s Safe Haven set in an offshore detention centre; Donna M Cameron’s ‘love letter to our planet’, The Rewilding; and Erin Gough’s Into the Mouth of the Wolf, part dystopia, part eco-thriller and part queer romance. Find the full shortlist here.
Check out previous Opportunities and Awards wraps for more announcements.
