Dharug and Lebanese writer Mykaela Saunders was recently awarded the Queensland Writers Fellowship at the 2025 Queensland Literary Awards.

The $20,000 fellowship will support Saunders as she develops her book 'Dear Uncle', a work following a conversation with her late uncle, Kev Saunders.

Ms Saunders said she was surprised and grateful for the recognition.

"I felt wonderful and to be honest, I thought I didn't get a look in," she said.

"By the date I thought I might have heard something I hadn't, so I brushed it off and thought okay, we'll try again next year.

"But then I got this beautiful email saying I'd been selected for the fellowship."

She said the fellowship will allow her to dedicate meaningful time to the project.

"I work full-time and I have a lot going on outside of work, so I don't have any spare time for writing," Ms Saunders said.

"The nature of this book is I can't write it in little snatches of stolen time.

"It takes a lot of time and emotional energy to sit with my uncle's work and respond to him in a way that's loving and authentic."

'Dear Uncle' draws its inspiration from a discovery Saunders made in 2018, when Ms Saunders found a collection of her uncle's poetry published in the Koori Mail.

Each chapter of the book will respond to one of his poems with a letter and an accompanying poem of her own.

"Each of the chapters takes one of his poems as the starting point and then I write a really long letter to him," Ms Saunders said.

"At the end of that I write a poem in response to his. Because all of his poems are really different, all of my letters and poems are also quite different."

Beyond 'Dear Uncle', Ms Saunders has established herself as a leading voice in Indigenous speculative fiction.

Her debut collection 'Always Will Be' reimagines futures for the Tweed Goori community, while she edited 'This All Come Back Now', the first anthology of Blackfella speculative fiction.

"I've always loved science fiction and fantasy," she said.

"I know that just as in the past, in the future we're not going to be extinct. We're not going to be genocided. We're going to be living together on our Country in culture."

While 'Always Will Be' explored futurism, Ms Saunders does not want to be limited to one genre.

"I'm not sure I'm going to write any more futurism," she said.

"I don't want to be a one-trick pony... every book is written in a different way and for a different purpose.

"'Dear Uncle' is nonfiction letters and poetry, 'Always Will Be' is fiction and I'm also working on another novel that's different again."

Ms Saunders doesn't have a specific message she hopes audiences takeaway from the book, ensuring her final copy is not clouded by end an result - rather being a conversation between her and her uncle.

"I'm really just writing it in conversation with him," she said.

"I'm totally aware that other people are going to be reading it, but if I start to let those people into my consciousness while I'm writing, the book's going to be very different.

"I want to write letters and poetry to him and see what happens... It's totally up to everyone else what they take out of it."