Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award

Congratulations to our 2025 Alumni Award recipients! Read more about them below.

The Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award offers financial support to a selection of talented writers with financial need.

We successfully raised funds for IWR 2025 thanks to the continued generosity of our donors who make these scholarships possible.

You can stay up to date by following us on social media or subscribing to our newsletter (join at the bottom of the page).

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Night view of Reykjavik, Iceland.

About the IWR Alumni Award

This will be the ninth time the IWR Alumni Award will be granted. It is so named because it has been funded by former IWR participants in addition to supporters of the IWR. We are extremely grateful for their generosity.

If you have questions about the Alumni Award or would like to offer a donation, please contact: [email protected]

How to Support the Award Fundraiser

Our dedicated IWR community and writing enthusiasts around the world contribute each year to help us bring more folks with financial need to the annual retreat. The fundraiser for the next retreat April 23-27, 2025, was a success, enabling IWR to continue to provide this valuable program.

Our Alumni Award fundraising campaign is an all-or-nothing event hosted on Iceland-based crowdfunding platform, Karolina Fund. We had to raise the full campaign amount of €5,000 ($5,500 USD, $7,350 CAD) by Aug. 15, 2024, to guarantee campaign success. THANK YOU for helping make this campaign a success! 

Look out for our 2026 Alumni Award fundraiser to begin next June. To offer a donation dedicated to the 2026 Alumni Awards, in the meantime, please contact [email protected].

Who can apply?

Look here for the 2026 Alumni Award application process to begin in August 2025. We will offer general guidelines for how to apply then.

Anyone who will be age 18 or over on the start date of the retreat is eligible to apply for a scholarship. The winning candidate(s) must demonstrate that they do not have the financial means to attend the conference without this award.* Candidates do not need to be professional writers, but should be serious about the craft and interested in developing their skills and contacts. Their writing interests must fit well with the faculty for the upcoming retreat (i.e. literary fiction, non-fiction, memoir).

Family members of the judges and those who have already attended the IWR are not eligible to apply.

What does it cover?

Entrants can apply for either full or partial funding.

Full funding covers one participant fee, four nights accommodation at the retreat hotel and round-trip flights to Iceland.

Partial funding covers the participant fee only (neither accommodation nor round trip flights).

We receive more applications for full funding than partial funding. Please ensure that you apply for the most suitable category for you. If you apply for full funding you are very unlikely to be considered for a partial award. 

The award does not include airport transfers, travel insurance, travel visas (if applicable)**, other incidentals or meals not listed in the itinerary.

Contributors

Thanks to the generosity of our founders, Eliza Reid and Erica Green, as well as the following friends and alum of the IWR, we were able to offer five scholarships for our 2024 event. Donors for the 2025 event are as follows:

IWR Underwriter

Katharine Kroeber-Wiley, Patrick Connolly

IWR Pillar

Cathy Raphael, Rick Theiss, Chloe Johnson, Lisa Morriss-Andrews

IWR Champion

Akvile Buitvydaite, Carol Binkowski, Christine Kerr, Edna McNamara, Eirene Chen, Joy Nash, Lindsay Nash, Lisa Pallatroni, Rhonda Owen, Sara Winokur, Sue Erbeck, Alexandria Lynch, Laurie Moy, Kate Blackburn, Ghislaine Patthey, Peggy Newell, Marie-Laure Chapuis

IWR Supporter Plus

Erika Sanders, Gay Inskeep, Gudny Helgadottir, Karen Redfearn, Lisa Harris, Mary Jo Sage, Randy Fleckenstein, Rhonda Owen, Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir, Molly Watson

IWR Supporters

Denise Morettin, Andrea Thomas, Erika Thorkelson,
Jan Stanley, Kathleen McCleary, Melanie Dubose, Elizabeth Brown, Dan Musgrave, Sólveig Ólafsdóttir

2025 Award Recipients

H.B. Asari

H.B. Asari

H.B. Asari is a Niger Deltan prose and poetry writer. Her work explores current and possible future climate realities. Her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2023, the Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize 2024. She has been published in adda, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Consequence Forum and more. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, Fine Arts Work Center, and the CANEX Book Factory. She is working on a novel and collection that seamlessly integrate all her interests. You can find her on Instagram as @draft_oroguitas.

Efemia Chela

Efemia Chela

Efemia Chela is a Zambian-Ghanaian writer and literary critic who was nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2014. In 2020, she was a writer-in-residence for PEN UK and Quay Words. Her bylines include Wasafiri, New Internationalist, Short Story Day Africa anthologies, the Johannesburg Review of Books, and PEN Passages: Africa. She is working on her debut novel and is represented by Pontas.

Catherine Dowling

Catherine Dowling

Catherine Dowling was born in Ireland and has divided her life between the United States and her home country. She has a Master's in History from the University of Montana and since then, has worked hard to create a checkered resume that includes waitressing, quality assurance, teaching, and psychotherapy as well as writing. She has published two books: Radical Awareness: Five Practices for a Fully Engaged Life, (Llewellyn Worldwide), and Rebirthing and Breathwork: A Powerful Technique for Personal Transformation. (Piatkus, UK). Her articles have appeared in Oneing, Rkvry, Positive Health, Inside Out, Lowestoft Chronicle, Montana Mouthful, HerStry and more, available at www.catherinedowling.com  She has lived in New York, Montana, California, and New Mexico but currently resides in Ireland. 

Julie Noble

Julie Noble

Julie Noble is an emerging writer in various genres based in Northern England. In 2019 her memoir piece "Detail" was published in Kit de Waal’s critically acclaimed Common People, and Julie was able to develop her writing with New Writing North. That same year she was awarded three awards including a Northern Writers Award, Arvon Gold Dust and Moniack Mhor Two Roads. 

In 2020 Claire Malcolm MBE suggested her as a presenter for "My Name Is Julie" for BBC Radio 4. The programme discusses the effect of lockdown on the education of children from a low socio-economic group, it is still available online.

In June 2021, Julie was selected for the GENESIS/Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers Programme. With Cathy Rentzenbrink as mentor, Julie wrote a memoir about the injustice for male and female victims of domestic abuse in the UK legal system. The work was shortlisted for the TLC Pitch Prize in 2022. Julie is now working on a fictional book incorporating multiple voices.

Julie’s fiction covers a wide range of subjects and has won prizes as well as appearing in magazines such as Mslexia. In recent years she has been working on plays which have been short and longlisted for national and international prizes.  

In 2021 Julie was one of the writer/performers in Dr Louise Powell’s short film "Counterculture" which premiered at Durham Book Festival.  In 2024 she was one of six recipients of the Raising Films Residency and has worked within the community to collect social history stories. This month she began a new development opportunity with Screen Yorkshire to bring a long-hidden intriguing history mystery onto film.

Julie has been applying for the Iceland Writers Retreat for seven years and is honoured to be a chosen as a recipient.

John Pucay

John Pucay

John Pucay is a writer from Baguio and Benguet, Philippines. His personal writing explores indigenous roots, mountain running, polyamory, and the complexities of making a living as an artist. His novel on 2020s dating, Karinderya Love Songs, was named a "Favorite Read" by one of the Philippines' largest bookstore chains. His short film on childhood, Game Boy Advance, premiered at the 2024 San Diego Filipino Film Festival in California. A recipient of several literary awards and creative writing fellowships, John's work has appeared in Vice, Rappler, Likhaan Journal, and Anomaly, among others. The Iceland Writers Retreat is his first international writing workshop. More details about him and his work can be found at johnpucay.com and on Instagram @johnpucay.

Aizhan Yesbolatova

Aizhan Yesbolatova

Aizhan Yesbolatova is a writer from Kazakhstan living in Jersey City. Her first English-language essay was published in HuffPost in 2024 and syndicated across international platforms such as Yahoo Life Malaysia, New Zealand, Canada, and Singapore. Excerpts of her essay also appeared in the French Magazine Aufeminin. 

She is currently working on a collection of essays exploring womanhood and identity through a Central Asian lens, drawing from her experience growing up in post-Soviet Kazakhstan with its economic turmoil, identity crisis, and traditional demands. Parallel to her writing, she is developing a documentary about her grandmother living with dementia in Eastern Kazakhstan. 

Through her trilingual writing in English, Kazakh, and Russian, she aims to bring often-overlooked Central Asian voices to global conversations about immigration, family relationships, and women's experiences.

Previous Winners:

2024: Marko Bogdanović, Georgina Dark, Monica Drake, Zehra Imam, Sandra Jackson-Opoku

2023: April Dobbins (Unites States / Iceland); Lisa Guenther (Canada); Tochukwu Okafor (Nigeria)

2020: Chelsie Bryant (United States; attended in 2022); Abak Hussain (Bangladesh; attended in 2023); Okechi Okeke (Nigeria; attended in 2023); Jo McClelland Phillips (Canada / Australia; attended in 2022); Chuck D. Smith (Philippines; attended in 2023); Michelle Walshe (Ireland; attended in 2022)

2019: Lucy Grace (UK); Daniel Musgrave (United States); Lola Opatayo (Nigeria); Jonaki Ray (India); Carien Smith (South Africa)

2018: Fatin Abbas (Sudan / United States); Michael Agugom (Nigeria); Puja Changoiwala (India); Julia Duin (United States); Nora Shychuk (United States)

2017: Akvile Buitvydaite (Lithuania / Denmark); Peter Ngila (Kenya), Nathan Ramsden (UK); Victor Yang (United States)

2016: Megan Ross (South Africa); April Wolfe (United States)