About Bella
Bella Battersby is a queer non-binary writer, living on unceded Gadigal land, currently finishing their MFA in Writing for Performance at NIDA. They specialise in the comedic queer realm, exploring themes of equality, dismantling the heteronormative view of life, belonging and friendship.
In 2020, Bella won the Darebin Mayor’s Writing Award for their prose piece ‘Bird’. In 2021, they graduated in the top 2% of RMIT in their BA (Creative Writing) making it onto the ‘Vice Chancellors List for Academic Excellence’. They have just finished up as a digital editor for the literary publication called Voiceworks.
For two years, Bella was a part of the Editorial Team for the n-SCRIBE Working Group based in Darebin (2020-2021). Through a blind submission process, they choose and edited pieces to be published in the print magazine. They were lucky enough to work under Bridget Caldwell Bright as head editor. Bella has also done some freelance copy-writing for the company Brand + Story and has sold multiple copies of their collaborative zine titled ‘Fizgig’ at the bookshop Better Read than Dead.
Bella has almost finished writing their queer animated web-series titled Roaches, which is like Friends except they are all queer, stoned, proper broke, Australian and Joey is a queer Russian sea urchin. They are also working on a queer ecological play that is just like The Wizard of Oz, but it’s set 500 years after the extinction of humanity and Dorothy is a Doritos chip Packet.
When they aren’t writing, you can find Bella at the cinema or frolicking in the water at Mahon Pool. Examples of their ludicrous prose and queer ideas can be found https://bellabattersby.wordpress.com/.
