Welcoming our 2026 Mid-Career Fellows
May 11, 2026
At some point, writing stops being about finding your voice and becomes about staying connected to it.
That can be difficult in the middle of a busy life, between work, parenting, expectation and the pressure of what comes next. For many writers, the mid-point of a literary career is less about arrival and more about endurance. It’s about continuing to make space for curiosity, vulnerability and creative risk, even when the path forward is uncertain.
This year, Centre for Stories is welcoming two writers into our Mid-Career Fellowship: Khin Myint and Emily Tsokos Purtill.
The fellowship is designed to support writers at an established stage in their practice, offering time, connection and space to continue developing their work.
For Emily Tsokos Purtill, writing has always existed alongside the demands of everyday life.
“Writing has always been a part of my life and it’s something that I’ve squeezed in between work and parenting,” she says. “It means staying curious about the world. I’m not someone that has all the answers and I have embraced that in my writing.”
Emily’s work often moves through questions of identity, migration and inherited memory. Drawing from her Greek background and lived experience across different countries and cities, her writing explores the threads between personal history and the wider world.
“I read and think about the lives of my great-grandparents and grandparents and integrate my own lived experience into these stories,” she says. “I have always been conscious of my place in history. We are all bridges between the past and future.”
Her reflections on writing are grounded less in certainty than openness. For writers still finding their voice, she encourages emotional honesty above all else.
“Reading widely is what helped me a lot. I have also embraced uncertainty and vulnerability in my writing. As a reader, emotional authenticity is very important.”
For Khin Myint, writing remains closely tied to the world around him and the social realities shaping it.
“The world is hardening,” he says. “Strongman optics and politics are everywhere. Racial hatred is up and populism is becoming more mainstream. This heightens the stakes of writing, which always responds to the mood of the moment in some way.”
Khin’s acclaimed debut novel Fragile Creatures explored grief, race, family and identity through deeply personal storytelling. As he continues developing new work, he finds himself increasingly drawn to questions around masculinity, class and race, and how ideas of manhood shift between different communities and environments.
“I’m really interested in exploring how ideals of manhood evolve differently in various neighbourhoods and cities,” he says, “how those ideals respond to things like socioeconomic class and race, and what that looks like on the ground for people living in those places.”
Alongside the creative work itself, Khin also reflects on the emotional balance required to sustain a writing practice over time.
“I wrote Fragile Creatures and it now moves through the world,” he says. “When it won the Roderick Award, a lot more people started asking what comes next. The mental game is different from the topic itself. It’s more about protecting the creative process and finding balance within it.”
For him, the fellowship also represents something deeply communal.
“I wrote my last book mostly in isolation, so I was honoured to be invited into the Centre’s orbit with this fellowship, and I’m enjoying getting to know the wider multiethnic community of which I’m also part.”
At Centre for Stories, we believe storytelling creates connection across generations, cultures and experiences. Through this fellowship, we’re proud to support writers whose work continues to challenge, question and deepen the way we understand ourselves and one another.
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