WORD CATEGORY
MALIYAH ARNOLD
MENDING, UNENDING
WRITER STATEMENT
“Mending, Unending” is a collection of three poems exploring the cycles and growing pains of womanhood. It gives space to emotional messiness and pain that is often repressed, performed or exploited while offering a way out of despair and disillusionment through rebirth, sisterhood, and reinvention.
BIO
Maliyah Arnold is an English and Media Communications student living and writing on Dharawal land. At seven, she broke her left arm, but her chatter distracted the doctor into casting the right. Her love for words and choice of degree naturally surprised no one. Her instagram is @maliyah_arnold.
JESSE CARPENTER
THE LOBSTER
WRITER STATEMENT
Some people would say “The Lobster” is about the nature of meaning in postmodernity. Others would say the message is simple: don't play with your food. What do you think?
BIO
I'm Jesse, I use they/them pronouns, and I'm a first year student majoring in mathematics and philosophy. I like folk music, Clarice Lispector, and sticking things to my wall. I dislike seafood and firsthand books. I write because I'm bad at keeping my mouth shut.
YIN-YIN CHANG
CIRCLE
WRITER STATEMENT
There are circular elements in our world, and I capture them purposefully in poetry. A state of mind, a conversation, a planet, and a grain of sand are individually different, but together through poetry they epitomise the patterns that circulate our everyday lives.
BIO
Yin-Yin Chang is a Bachelor of Arts student majoring in English and Japanese. She writes short stories and poetry, and is currently working on her first novel. Yin-Yin enjoys magical realism and psychology, which infuses her writing on memory, empathy, and family.
STEPH CHIANG
HOME/BODY
WRITER STATEMENT
Through the frustration of trying to find a home in Sydney, I realised how the concept of the self is so closely tied to the vessel in which we reside- our home. I wanted to write a piece that captured how I felt in this moment: lost, vulnerable, uncertain.
BIO
Steph Chiang is a Master's of International Relations student and professional researcher working in the non-profit sector.
ESZTER COOMBS
PATIO BOG
WRITER STATEMENT
“Patio Bog” is a story about a place where two people leave their garbage. The bog is intended as a mirror to their neat home on the other side of the yard, furnished and complete like a dwelling, but also dark and belching and perverted, alluding to what they do not think or speak about in the confines of their relationship.
BIO
Eszter is a student at the University of Sydney, studying English and law.
CAL GUINO
A BIRDWATCHER’S OBSERVATIONS OF WESTERN SYDNEY
WRITER STATEMENT
In my poetry collection, I imagine a father whose only child has left home and is now trying to cope with empty nest syndrome. The birds of Western Sydney guide him away from the constraints of parenthood and work as he learns to appreciate their curious and oft-neglected beauty.
BIO
Cal is from the Philippines and now lives on Burramattagal land in Western Sydney. They study English and Politics & International Relations. Sometimes, they write prose. Their short story, Kalabaw, was shortlisted for the Best Australian Yarn in 2023. This collection is their first attempt at poetry.
M. K. HAN
WHITE WINGS
WRITER STATEMENT
“White Wings” is about dating an angel; about the particular (racialised) experience of loving someone "out of your league"; about wanting to be with him -- then, eventually, be him; of the heartbreak that arises from such a flawed view of the world.
BIO
When he has to, M. K. Han studies Education, English, and Latin. He loves to read and write, though he doesn't do enough of either. In 2023, he won the Ballarat Writers Inc. Southern Cross Short Story Competition.
ADA KAHN
MY NEW BED ISN’T LIKE MY OLD ONE. THEY’RE BOTH BROKEN THOUGH.
WRITER STATEMENT
The word ‘essay’ comes from the Old French essai, meaning ‘attempt’ or ‘experiment’. Someone once told me Michel de Montaigne, who coined this term ‘essay’, wrote that the subject of an essay is always something other than what is written. I’m not sure he really did write that though.
BIO
The earliest thing Ada remembers is eating sand at a beach. Her writing almost always begins with place, interrogating and antagonising the human relationships with and within it. She’s currently interested in uncertainty, multiplicity, and ‘enstrangement’. She works in both fiction and non-fiction.
LEON KARAGIC
DO WE DREAM IN JUMPCUTS?
WRITER STATEMENT
“DO WE DREAM IN JUMPCUTS” is a textual recording of one's affinity with film refracted with self, played back inverted; a perceptual break-down through a growing sense of audio-visual determinism, a fixed moment streaming through retinas and into the subconscious abyss that cuts up fragments to piece together.
BIO
Leon Karagic is a musician and perennial B.A. undergraduate majoring in Philosophy with an ear to the ground and eyes to the skies.
KUYILI KARTHIK
THE OLD MAN AND JYOTI
WRITER STATEMENT
“The Old Man and Jyoti” travels through memory to face inevitable loss. Childhood grief is fragmentary and filtered through eyes and hearts of others. I look at loss through different prisms: the acceptance of the dying, adolescence in the thick of emotion, and the pragmatism of adulthood. I will miss everyone I’ve ever met.
BIO
I am a Tamil/Australian writer from Chennai living in Gadigal Land. I major in International and Comparative Literary Studies and Law. I write prose, poetry, reviews, and articles. Publications with my work include Honi Soit, PULP magazine, and Film magazine Best Boy.
JULIE MCELHONE
AN OPERA OF SIDE USE
WRITER STATEMENT
I converse with and through the humanities, touching on ways we manage and use prior text that resist narrative structures. I make a move to privilege presence over meaning-making in an age in which technological advances are transforming old ways of reading, writing and remembering. This poem sequence is built from my conversation with lifted printed text that in some way relate to a handwritten eighteenth-century commonplace book that belonged to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) now held in Fisher Library Rare Books and Special Collections.
BIO
McElhone is grateful to live and work on unceded Gadigal land and has recently submitted towards a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing at USyd, researching and writing around an eighteenth-century manuscript held in Fisher Library Rare Books. Her text-based practice includes poetry, image, and text-related objects.
AMELIA RAINES
WHEN SHE DIES, SHE WANTS TO BE CREMATED, AND FOR HER ASHES TO BE STORED IN AN EMPTY AESOP BOTTLE
WRITER STATEMENT
This piece is composed of six vignettes, which shift between first, second, and third person to question wellness propaganda, technological despair, and the sanctity and satire of quiet thought.
BIO
Amelia Raines is an Editor of Honi Soit, and has been stuck on the same mission in GTA Vice City for about 3 years.
BINEETA SAHA
MY DREAM GIRL, MY WHITE GIRL -
WRITER STATEMENT
My work takes on the grating, condescending, implicit concerned voice that harbours within White Guilt. I use humour to reveal the necessity of intersectionality in feminist spaces. I feel that as a WOC sometimes I am unable to defend myself against the racism I am subject to. I use my work as my sardonic defence. I actually do like white women if they treat me normal.
BIO
My name is Bee! I am a second year student studying a Bachelors of Social Work and Arts. I'm still navigating how to write and how to use my writing. My interests definitely lie within food-blogging and prose. I love watching the NRL and swatching rom&nd liptints.
LOTTE WEBER
TEPID
WRITER STATEMENT
“Tepid” is a collection of wandering subconsciousness, exploring the in-between realms of dawn, sleeping, and waking. Incorporating elements of concrete poetry, it explores ideas of guilt, dream messaging, and liminal spaces.
BIO
Lotte Weber is a writer in her third year at the University of Sydney. She is a prospective 2025 Editor of Honi Soit. Her other work can be found in places like Women’s Honi and Endo Articles.
JADEN WHITE
I WANT YOU TO HAUNT ME
WRITER STATEMENT
This poem is written for my dying grandmother. It is about her descent into dementia and my attempts to grasp at memories of her and of Sri Lanka.
BIO
My name is Jaden White. I am 22 years old. I wrote this poem on unceded Wangal land. I believe in a free Palestine.
SIMONE WONG
COHABITATION
WRITER STATEMENT
Cohabitation is a rumination on mirrored lives and the ensuing obsession over alternate forms of being - who would I be if not for…? The characters are embalmed in a dually abundant and decaying illusion of the orchard, constantly oscillating between possibility and reality. But mirrors are only tricks of the light.
BIO
Simone Wong is a first year English student and poet. Her writing tends towards themes of interpersonal tensions and spectatorship, experimenting with lyricism and the way words can be compressed and moulded on the tongue - writing is a physical reckoning.