Svetlana Sterlin is the author of Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award-winning collection If Movement Was a Language (Vagabond Press, 2024), which was Commended in the 2024 Anne Elder Award. The 2026 UQ Creative Writing Fellow, she lives in Meanjin and writes prose, poetry and the occasional screenplay. Her work appears in Westerly, Cordite and Australian Poetry Journal and has been recognised in the Queensland Literary Awards, Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, Queensland Young Writers Award and others.