Sydney Writers' Centre blog

Outstanding travel writing mentorship opportunity, and a trip to Turkey!

If you've got itchy feet and twitchy hands and you're ready to be a travel writer, then this competition may be the best possible catalyst around.

The Rough Guide travel book is offering a month long trip to Turkey for an aspiring travel writer, to be mentored by Terry Richardson who writes the Rough Guide books. You'll even be tasked with your own assignment in Turkey, for publication in the next Rough Guide to Istanbul.

To enter you need to submit a 500 word travel essay on one of the nominated topics and tell the team behind Rough Guides why you should be awarded the scholarship.

It looks awesome - and a few of the team here are also considering entering. So get to it!

Australian Traveller launches Virtual Intern Program for those looking to get their first break into the travel writing industry

If you’ve recently graduated from one of our Feature Writing or Travel Writing courses, chances are that your head is bursting with ideas, and you already have evocative sentences waiting to be shared with the world.

   

Australian Traveller magazine is calling for people to choose a destination or experience that you love in your local area, and enter 600 words about it. You can write your piece as a review, a guide-book style piece or a portrait of colourful locals. The editors of Australian Traveller will select their favourite entry each month and publish it on their Website.

For more details and to enter click here. This could be the first time you get published, and any of our published graduates can tell you that you’ll never forget the first time you see your name as a byline.

Summer School Intensives Announced for January and February 2011

We have VERY exciting news. We're running our most popular and requested courses (Creative Writing, Feature Writing for Magazines and Newspapers, Travel Writing, Travel Memoir Writing) in intensive formats this January and February 2011.

You can now learn from industry professionals in one week or a weekend, rather then 5 weeks, which is great news for those of you who live interstate, have caring responsibilities and or just can't spare 5 evenings over 5 weeks, and need to focus and learn the course content in much a much shorter time period.

Watch this video for more info:

 

Click To Play

You can click here to enrol. Places are limited to our standard class sizes, and they're filling fast, so make sure you snap up your place now and start moving towards you reaching your writing dreams.

Unleash Your Inner Travel Writer - for free flights!

The idea of getting paid to write about your travels, and getting paid to travel is a dream of many, many of our students, whether they're studying the travel writing courses, or feature writing ones. So much so that we're running a travel writing trip to Lucca, Tuscany for the first time next year.

So we were very excited when we discovered this Jetstar competition that awards a return flight for you and a friend, in exchange for your favourite travel story in 600 words. The return flight is to anywhere in the Jetstar network, and there will be a winner drawn every day until February 1st next year.

The only catch is that you need to have flown Jetstar on that trip, but I'm sure many of us have so get writing!

BREAKING NEWS: Details for our first Travel Writing retreat to Florence announced!

One of the main queries that comes to our office via email, over the phone, from our friends and from every second student in our feature writing course is “how do I get into travel writing?”
While we offer two courses for travel writing, a four week course and a two hour intensive intro seminar, we’re thrilled to announce the details for our first Travel Writing retreat to the much-rhapsodized and written about Florence, in Tuscany.

This writing retreat has been custom-designed by the Sydney Writers’ Centre and Bookshop Travel to immerse you in the romantic, Italian town ideal and deliver more then 20 hours worth of travel writing information and training. The classes are led by Sue White, a very busy and successful travel writer, and your cultural exploration is coordinated by Luisa Volpato, an Italian-speaking tour manager.

For more details you can check out the webpage, but make sure you register swiftly if you’re interested, because places in our writing retreats always fill fast, and this one in particular has been long anticipated.