ABOUT

Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer, artist and photographer.

Her writing is primarily creative nonfiction, considering issues of anxiety, control and intimacy. Her first book, The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, a collection of non-fiction essays about the unruly body in late capitalism, won the 2021 Quentin Bryce Award. She was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize and received the 2020 ABR Victorian Rising Star award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Walkley Awards, the Hammond House International Short Story Prize, the Nillumbik Prize, the Disquiet Literary Contest and the Darebin Mayor’s Writing Award. She has been published in The Monthly, Overland, Meanjin, Island Magazine, Kill Your Darlings, the ABR, the AFR and The Guardian. She reviews arts for the Australian Book Review and co-hosted the podcast Contact Mic. She is represented by Rach Crawford at Wolf Literary.

Her art practice uses comedy and surprise to create generous encounters with tensions around anxiety and future fear. She works particularly with immersive binaural sound walks, video and text-based installation, and collaborates across live art, participatory performance and theatre. Recent commissions have included works for Blindside, Platform Arts, UNESCO City of Design, Chamber Made, Experimenta, The Unconformity, the NGV, Geelong Gallery, MoreArt and councils around Victoria. She has been a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, the Wyndham Art Prize, the international MTV RE:DEFINE award and the 45downstairs Emerging Artist Award, and has taken part in residencies across Australia and Asia. She is a current PhD candidate at RMIT.

She is one of Australia’s most experienced commercial theatre and festival photographers, shooting for hundreds of clients across Australia and the world, including Melbourne Festival, MTC, Malthouse Theatre, Chunky Move, Arts House, Rawcus, Back to Back, Melbourne Fringe Festival and Next Wave Festival. She has been a winner of the Best Portrait prize at the CCP Salon, a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize, a two-time finalist in the Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women and a semi-finalist in the Moran Photographic Portrait Prize.

Her CV is here. You can subscribe to her newsletter, This Missive, here. You can follow her on Instagram.

You can contact her via email at sarah.walker.photos@gmail.com.