About

Tina Cartwright is a widely-published writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work examines the commodification of identity, disconnection, the ethics of art, and money.
Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The New York Times, Overland, la piccioletta barca (UK), and The Victorian Writer, among others.
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She holds a Graduate Diploma in Secondary Teaching (English and Spanish) and a Bachelor Of Arts in Linguistics from The University of Otago. In 2008 she was awarded a prestigious International Languages Abroad Scholarship in conjunction with the Ministerio de Ecucación, Formación Profesional y Deportes to teach English in Spain. In 2011 she studied
Superior Spanish, Art and Culture of Indigenous People and Contemporary Mexican Fiction at UNAM in Mexico City.
She has taught Languages and Creative Writing in Spain, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.
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In 2025 she is a reader at the closing evening of Footscray West Writers Fest.
In 2024 she was a KSP Writers' Centre Fellow to work on her novel aka Sandy Blight and was short listed for the KSP Writers' Centre short fiction competition. In 2023 and 2024 her manuscripts were long listed for
the Michael Gifkins Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
Her short story Octopus was runner-up in the 2021 takahē short story competition. Her short fiction was shortlisted for the 2017 ABWF short story competition and was highly commended in the South Island Short Story Competition.
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In 2022 she was part of the Hidden Nerve Program offered by the ACT Writers' Centre. In 2020 she studied Novel Writing at Faber Academy with Emily Bitto and Sophie Cunningham.
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She coordinated Melbourne on Sub Emerging Writers' Evening. She has completed a three-month internship with Broadsheet Media and worked with Cornerstones Literary Consultancy in their mentorship program. She studied Scriptwriting with Metro TV in Sydney and her monologue Masha's Fire was performed by Soot Theatre Company in Geelong in 2021.
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She is interested in Euhemerism and Linguistic Typology. Her work frequently focuses on identity, class, and connection, in the broadest sense.
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