Dani Netherclift is a writer and poet living on un-ceded 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 book shops or via Upswell,

She has had lyric essays published in Westerly, The Slow Canoe, Island Mag and Meanjin. 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. Her next big MS project, Preludes for an ending was highly commended in Varuna’s 2024 Roderick Centre application for Regional Rural Fellowship.

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 or are upcoming 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).