Dani Netherclift is a writer and poet living on unceded Taungurung lands in the Victoria High Country, surrounded by mountains. She lives with her husband, son and daughter and has a PhD in creative writing. Her area of research is the lyric essay and its intersections with white space, elegy and the body. Her first book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies is out now, published by Upswell, available in all good bookshops ( Ink Bookshop, always has signed copies), or you can order via Upswell. A North American/Canadian edition of Vessel will be released with Assembly Press in January 2026. More to come on that exciting news!

She has had lyric essays published in Heat, The Guardian, Antipodes, Westerly, The Slow Canoe, Island Mag and Meanjin and elsewhere. Her essay ‘Our unmoored selves’ was recently shortlisted in the 2025 Ada Cambridge Biography prize, and published in the Ada’s 2025 anthology. Her essay, ‘Read as a boy’ won second prize in the 2024 Portside Review Human Rights Essay Prize and was further shortlisted in the nonfiction section of the Woollahra Digital Literary Award. 

In 2023, Dani’s lyric essay ‘Telephone and Address Book’ won first prize out of almost 600 entries in The Local Word Prize, jointly sponsored by Geelong Regional Libraries and Deakin University. Her essay ‘Beneath These Surfaces’ received an Honourable Mention in the 2023 AAALS (American and Australian Association of Literature’s Fiction and Nonfiction Prize, and will be published in the upcoming edition of Antipodes Journal.  She was also the winner of the 2020 AAWP/The Slow Canoe Creative Nonfiction Prize for her essay ‘An incomplete archive of blue’

Her poems have been published in 5 Island’s Press Oystercatcher One, in Cordite, Stilts, Rabbit, Plumwood Mountain, Mascara, Blue Bottle Journal, The Slow Canoe Lockdown Audio Project, Verity La, Meniscus, Swamp, Otoliths and In Recent Works Press anthology What we carry, as well as on a street in Adelaide for the Raining Poetry in Adelaide project via the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Dani was the winner of Queenscliffe Literary Festival’s inaugural Microfiction Prize, in 2020, as well as being highly commended in the first Byron Writer’s Festival microfiction competition (2016) and had her 8-word story selected to be beamed onto massive billboards around Brisbane in Queensland Writer’s Centre (2017).

Dani is the president and co-curator of the Mansfield Readers and Writers Festival, which will take place 11-12 of October 2025.