Details
Release Date: 1st May 2026
65 pages, softcover
Edition Artist
Bella La Spina
Bella La Spina is a contemporary printmaker practicing on Gadigal and Kuringgai Land. Primarily working with found and archival imagery, her practice expands across the mediums of printmaking, photomedia and sculpture to create assemblages that explore themes of memory, history, erasure and haunting. Bella’s work is predominantly process driven, and utilises the extractive processes of analogue photography and printmaking to strip back and reveal what narratives may be held below the official archive exterior. UV sensitive emulsions and translucent, delicate materials such as silk organza are held in a constant tension against the industrial qualities of hardwood screen printing frames and copper sheets, which has resulted in an alternative archive that confronts the complexities of the archival landscape and touches on themes of spectrality, ephemera and fragmentation, to create a nuanced portrait of place and its history.
Bella graduated from the National Art School in 2023 with an MFA in Printmaking. Her works are held nationally and internationally including in the Arts Law Centre of Australia collection and the National Art School Archive. Her works have been shown in various exhibitions including SELECTED: a Photography and Printmaking exhibition curated by Andrew Totman at CBD Gallery in Sydney and Disruption: Discourse and Exchange at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, Thailand. She is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery, Rushcutters Bay
The fifth edition of Written Off is guest edited by Deborah Prospero and features art by Bella La Spina with ten local authors works. Supporting independent Australian Creatives and Writing.
Excerpt of Works
Roadside Altar
“Oh, bud.”
The kangaroo’s hip was dislocated, legs dislodged and bent in odd angles, as if she was hit mid-jump.
Natasha Hertano
is a Chinese-Indonesian writer, public speaker, and educator based in Naarm. Her work can be found on Kill Your Darlings, ABC, Australian Multilingual Project, Archer & more. Her short stories are part of the anthologies ‘Everything All At Once’ (Ultimo Press, 2021), ‘New Australian Fiction 2023’ (Kill Your Darlings, 2023), and ‘Bodies of Land’ (Sinister Wisdom, 2026). She is currently writing her debut novel, a historical fantasy YA, while teaching at Story Studios Australia.
A Meditation on Grief (Three Visions of the Cherished Dead)
I.
I had a dream last night that I was staying with a friend of mine, who’d passed away from cancer years ago. He was terribly young, but Death does not discriminate…
Benjamin D. Muir
is a reformed juvenile born in and writing on unceded Dharug land (Penrith). He is interested in the relationships between horror, grief, trauma, form, historiography, satire, and philosophical pessimism. His work is highly metafictional, oscillating between high farce, Menippean satire, and oppressive philosophical horror. It has been compared to Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Borges, Sebald, Ellis, and Danielewski.
Benjamin’s forthcoming novel, The McMillan Diaries, was the recipient of the 2019 AAWP/UWAP Chapter One Prize. His work has been read and published in SBS Australia, Studio Stories via FBI Radio’s Or It Didn’t Happen, Antipodean Science Fiction, The Conversation, Affirmations: of the Modern and several anthologies. One of his articles for SBS Voices, I’m a Writer, An Academic and a Trolley Boy went viral twice and was adapted into an episode of SBS’s podcast, Let Me Tell You, which won Australian Arts and Culture Podcast of the Year, 2022.
Four Shots in The Hand
It’d happened overnight. Or at least it’d seemed that way. Chris’s fascination with peppermint tea. For most of his adult life, he’d been an avid coffee drinker.
Matt Wildig
is a Palawa writer who lives on Dharug Country. He’s a current Master of Research student at Western Sydney University and writes speculative fiction that often features Western Sydney as a focal point of the story.
Everything Nails
The manicurist tuts. It is a sound without beginning or end, one that stutters rhythmically like a steam train clicking along rusted steel tracks.
Katharine Pollock (PhD)
is the author of Starry Eyed (Wakefield Press, August 2025) and Her Fidelity (Penguin Random House, 2022). Her latest novel, Starry Eyed, is the comedic story of a woman making bad choices thanks to her obsession with a cult sci-fi film director. Her debut novel, Her Fidelity, is a coming-of-age story set in an indie record shop. Both novels examine the fraught intersections of fandom and feminism. Her Fidelity was included in The Age’s Books That Made Their Mark list in 2022 and shortlisted for the Australian Book Design Awards in 2023.
Katharine has been a writer-in-residence at KSP and Varuna, and regularly speaks at writing festivals and events. Katharine has
contributed ongoingly to The Guardian, and has had short stories and personal essays published online and in print. She lives in Sydney
and is represented by Benython Oldfield at Zeitgeist Agency.
Hunger
In Year Eleven there is a pregnancy epidemic in my high school. You only need to look sideways at one of the girls who looks like they’ve swallowed a bowling ball and that’s it.
Felicity Castagna
is a writer, teacher, and public speaker. As a published author, her latest book Girls in Boys’ Cars, won the Victorian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, as well as being named a CBCA Honour Book. Felicity’s previous novel, No More Boats was a finalist in the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Awards and her YA novel The Incredible Here and Now received The Prime Minister’s Award as well as The IBBY. Her next novel, Peaches, a page-turning literary novel for adults about food and politics, will be published in 2027. Felicity is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Western Sydney University with The Writing and Society Research Centre.
Undertow
The internship is in a building that once belonged to a large shipping company. It is near the harbour, next to a youth hostel that looks like a Soviet apartment block.
Trish May
is an Australian teacher living in Copenhagen. She completed her PhD in English at the University of New South Wales in 2021. She is currently learning Danish, and in her spare time she volunteers at a not-for-profit bookshop. She has never liked seafood.
This Train
JANE stands on the edge of an empty platform. Waiting.
Vanessa Bates
Vanessa Bates is an award-winning playwright for stage and radio and also writes for film and television. She has been an affiliate playwright of the Sydney Theatre Company and Griffin Theatre with plays also produced by Malthouse, Deckchair and Vitalstatistix Theatre. Her work has won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Patrick White Playwright Award, and the Griffin Award.
River Diwata
When I was a girl, I used to think I could become one of the characters from the books and movies that I loved. Someday I’d find myself inside their fiction, playing out the details of some other, more exciting life…
Carielyn Tunion
is a writer, videopoet, educator, and cultural worker with a background in film studies and community advocacy.
In her work, she is currently exploring folklore, feminine monstrosity, and yearning from a critical Filipino and Hong Kong diaspora perspective. She is interested in how intimacy, power and desire circulate across cultural and geographic boundaries.
Canal Line
Whenever I noticed a storm was over, I would rise from my workstation and wander to the edge of the office. I always wore the same contemplative expression, an expression that suggested this wandering was part of my process, and my colleagues left me alone.
Josh Sutton
is an emerging writer studying for a master’s degree in literature and creative writing at Western Sydney University. His work is usually concerned with uncertainty and its (uncertain) implications. He works in a bookshop, which he regularly abandons to go on long backpacking trips. This is his first published work.
European Poems
Look, the church roof’s undergut
Darkribbed by old leprous wood
Flies the naves and crowns the apse
Giacomo Bianchino
is a writer and a critic of books, art, and cinema. He teaches at the University of Sydney and University of Technology, Sydney, and writes on the relationship between politics and literature – particularly modern epic poetry and Australian socialist realism. He as written for Jacobin, The Nation, The Conversation, Overland, and Australian Book Review. He also runs the Straying for the Morsel blog on substack.
A Guest
Open the door, Tronto. Monsignor is here, and only –
Sly eyes across the table.
– One hour late.
Giacomo Bianchino
is a writer and a critic of books, art, and cinema. He teaches at the University of Sydney and University of Technology, Sydney, and writes on the relationship between politics and literature – particularly modern epic poetry and Australian socialist realism. He as written for Jacobin, The Nation, The Conversation, Overland, and Australian Book Review. He also runs the Straying for the Morsel blog on substack.
He Who Has Eyes
Even though my parents rarely took time away from their panel-beating garage, they still made time for a few caravan-park holidays when I was a kid…
Deborah Prospero
lives, works, and writes on Dharug Country in Sydney’s West. She is an intersectional feminist of Uruguayan and Chinese-Australian heritage with a keen interest in writing about people and their placemaking stories. With work featured in Refinery29, MoreThanMelanin, Locative Magazine, and the Mamiwatta Collections Journal, Deborah weaves her lived experience into cultural commentary. In 2025, Deborah won the ‘My Place in Cumberland’ Story Competition and was a recipient of the 2024 Varuna x Whitlam Institute Essay Residency. She is the guest editor for Written Off Issue 5