It's a fellowship that has nurtured countless award-winning creative works - and Brisbane's Sarah Holland-Batt is about to join its prestigious ranks.
The award-winning writer and QUT academic will spend the next four weeks writing short fiction at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.
MacDowell is the oldest artists' colony in the United States and boasts 65 Pulitzer Prize winners among its alumni.
Its fellowships are notoriously difficult to attain, particularly for writers outside the US.
"It's quite awe-inspiring to think of the artists and writers who have spent time at McDowell," said Ms Holland-Batt, a creative writing and literary studies lecturer with QUT's Creative Industries Faculty.
"Some of my favourite novelists have written great novels there - it's where Jeffrey Eugenides wrote Middlesex and Jonathan Franzen wrote some of The Corrections.
"The opportunity to be part of this community of really accomplished writers and artists is both humbling and exiting."
The MacDowell Fellowship was established to give talented artists an inspiring environment in which they could produce enduring works.
MacDowell selects recipients based solely on their artistic excellence.
Since 1907 it has hosted almost 7,000 visual artists, composers and writers, who work on their projects in secluded studios by day but regroup in the evening to share their progress and inspire their colleagues.
It's this intentional cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines that excites Ms Holland-Batt the most.
"MacDowell Fellows all have an idea of the project they want to work on when they take up their residency, but of course they have no idea of who they're sharing the space with until they arrive," she said.
"You might come thinking you'll finish your novel but end up meeting a terrific classical composer and collaborating on an opera - you just don't know what you'll end up doing."
The Gold Coast-born writer is no stranger to international writer's residencies. She has already completed four, including a six-month Australia Council residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome.
The MacDowell Fellowship is her first set within an artistic community and her first in North America.
Ms Holland-Batt has had many works of poetry and fiction published over the past 13 years, including her award-winning debut book of poetry, Aria.
She plans to start a new fiction manuscript while at the colony.
"As an academic, you don't get very much uninterrupted time to just work on your own writing so this opportunity is a real gift," she said.
"That time and space to myself will give me an enormous head start on my new book - in terms of productivity, MacDowell alumni say a week at the colony is worth four weeks on the outside."
Ms Holland-Batt has also just been granted the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, a prestigious Scottish residency that will see her share a castle outside of Edinburgh with four other writers later in 2014.
Media contact: Kate Haggman, QUT Media, 07 3138 0358, kate.haggman@qut.edu.au (after hours 0407 585 901)
