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Home > Get involved > Fellowships > Children's Storytelling and Literature Fellowship

Children's Storytelling and Literature Fellowship

Family reading a book

Artists share captivating ideas that celebrate the art of storytelling for, by and with children. Inviting us to play!

Storytelling for children ages zero to 18 can take many forms, such as writing, illustration, music, oral storytelling, and physical experience.

The artist will have access to more than 100,000 children's collection items, including:

  • novels
  • picture books
  • graphic novels
  • art and sculpture
  • realia
  • poetry
  • stories.

The fellowship includes:

  • $15,000 funding
  • desk space at the Library for 12 months
  • access to collections and Library staff expertise.

The funding is based on 3 months of work in the Library, either continuous or broken up over the year.

2024 recipients

Anthony and Declan Crowley – Doc Provok's Lair of Lies

This project will use the Library's zine, comic and graphic novel collections to research and create an interactive digital graphic novel and accompanying resources. They aim to help young people aged 10 to 14 to develop critical thinking in an age of deepfakes, AI, product placement, algorithmic bias and truth self-selection.

Declan Crowley is an emerging illustrator and animator with an Advanced Diploma in Screen and Media and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Animation).

Declan is a Hobsons Bay Junior Fiction Award winner. His work was featured in the Melbourne International Film Festival and Setting Sun Film Festival in Yarraville.

Anthony Crowley is a storyteller, theatre-maker, composer and arts educator with 40 years of professional experience creating immersive learning experiences. He has worked for Clemenger Advertising in print and television media. He has won several awards, including a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and an R.E. Ross Trust Prize for Drama.

Previous recipients

Learn more about the inspiring projects undertaken by past and present fellows in our fellows gallery.

  • 2022: Juliet Miranda Rowe with the project All Will Be Revealed, an exploration of the connection between the history of stage magic and the contemporary moving image through the WG Alma Conjuring Collection.
  • 2019: Matt Chun with the children's picture book Safe Passage and research into the history of Australian children's books as reflecting, or contributing to, the visual culture or semiotics of settler colonialism and White Australia Policy.
  • 2018: Leanne Hall for the YA novel The Celestial about celebrity, politics, race, performance and identity in Melbourne on the eve of WWII, and John Oldmeadow (Honorary) for the article A history of the development of the Dromkeen Collection, referencing the Library's completed listing of the Dromkeen manuscripts collection.
  • 2017: Dr Lili Wilkinson for the YA novel The Wild Kindness, which confronted the lost girls trope head-on, restoring agency to the lost girls of literature in a postmodern feminist reclamation.
  • 2016: Stephanie Holm with the book manuscript From Curious Creatures to Bushland Beasts: A Graphic Novel Exploring Representations of Australian Fauna and Flora in Early Australian Children's Book Publishing.
  • 2015: Lyndal Mebberson for the documentary Onions, Bunions, Corns and Crabs – From the Magic Pudding to Lockie Leonard: Adapting Australian Children's Literature for Stage and Screen.
  • 2014: Theresa O'Connor for her project researching the Library's Children's Literature Collection to create a series of paper puppet workshops and a pop-up puppet show.