Meet Weekend Writer's Resident 2026 - Mersija Ilic
Mersija Ilic is an emerging writer who lives and works in the South -Western Sydney suburb of Campbelltown, NSW.
She is from a bilingual and bicultural background, and this weaves its way through her storytelling. In her writing, Mersija explores the issues faced by women when confronted with domestic violence, lack of education and fear. What fascinates her most is understanding this journey and uncovering the strength and resolve needed to survive such adversity. Her short story The Shotgun was shortlisted for the EM Fletcher Award in 2021 and was published in the FHACT publication Every Family has a Story.
In 2023 two of her short stories were longlisted – The Stroke of the Pencil in the Sydney Hammond Prize and A Redfern Tapestry in the Lane Cove Literary Prize. In 2024, Mersija was accepted into the Westwords Academy Program and in 2025, she was longlisted in the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers.
Mersija is working on a memoir based on her mother’s life - a woman growing up in a village in the Bosnian hinterlands in the mid twentieth century. Her mother’s story is contrasted with her own experience of growing up as a migrant child in Redfern in the 1970’s and her return to Yugoslavia as a fourteen-year-old in the early 1980’s.
Mersija believes that each one of us has a story worth telling and that our power to survive and to create a better world for future generations lies in the sharing of that story.