We are over the bookshelves excited to introduce you to the 2025 NYWF team!

We’re a brand new team of young (well, most of us) writers excited by the possibility of developing emerging writers and fostering a love of creation. 

The 2025 NYWF team consists of Thirangie Jayatilake, Festival Coordinator, Lay Maloney, Creative Producer, Huyen Hac Helen Tran, Creative Producer, and Monique Wallace, Marketing & Digital Coordinator.

The NYWF will be taking place from 3-6 October 2025 on the land of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples in Newcastle, NSW.

Follow us on Instagram, Threads and TikTok, or sign up to our mailing list to keep up to date with NYWF news, including our artist call out for this years festival. We’d love to have you join us. 

 

Meet the team

Thirangie Jayatilake, Festival Coordinator

Thirangie is a writer and editor based in Naarm with an MA in Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing from the University of Melbourne, and a BA in Literature and Creative Writing from New York University. 

She’s been published in Airport Road, Jacaranda, Farrago, Myraid, Postscript, Gazelle, and Xenozine. She has read her work at the Emerging Writers Festival and the 2023 NYWF. Thirangie has served as an editor at several small publishing houses and magazines. Written in a narrative prose poetry style, her poetry addresses social politics, nostalgia, place and memory. Thirangie’s fiction includes young female protagonists grappling with the themes of gender, race, identity and growing up.

Having worked as a curatorial assistant for the Galle Literary Festival, Thirangie is excited to develop the NYWF further and support more emerging writers.

 

Lay Maloney, Creative Producer

Lay is a young genderfluid storyteller of the Gumbaynggirr and Gunggandji nations and South Sea Islander heritage based on Dunghutti Country. They are the recipient for the black&write! Fellowship with the State Library of Queensland for their LGBTQIA+ YA manuscript titled WEAVING US TOGETHER which is hitting the shelves August 2025.

They were also the Emerging Producer for the 2024 Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival and current Blak & Bright Literary Development Co-Ordinator. Lay is published in ‘NANGAMAY dream MANA gather DJURALI grow – First Nations Australia LGBTQIA+ Poetry collection’ edited by Alison Whittaker & Steven Lindsay Ross, Cordite Poetry Review ‘Tell It Like You Mean It’, and Soft Stir issue 3.

 

Huyen Hac Helen Tran, Creative Producer

Helen is a writer and arts worker currently living and working on Gadigal land. Her writing and research revolve around digital identities, cultural inheritance, the body, care, and personal narrative.

You can find her writing in Liminal Magazine, Meanjin, The Suburban Review, The Big Issue, and more. She is currently completing a Masters Degree in Literature and Creative Writing at Western Sydney University. She is the Digital Communications Officer for the Sydney Review of Books, and a recipient of the 2025 Whitlam Essay Residency.

 

Monique Wallace, Marketing & Digital Coordinator

Monique lives on Awabakal land and is an avid writer both in her professional and personal life. She has more than 12 years of experience in marketing & communications across several industries where she overuses em dashes and waxes lyrical about the importance of storytelling. 

Her work is featured in Kill Your Darlings, and Teacher, Teacher published by Affirm Press. Monique completed the 2024 Faber Writing Academy Writing a Novel – Online course with Carrie Tiffany and was shortlisted for the 2024 Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Prize for her unpublished young adult novel Something You Should Know which is about grief, love, and how there’s the right song for everything.