Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Older Writers Grant
The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Maria Olujic is the winner of the 2025 Older Writers Grant!
Since 2004, the Older Writers Grant has been awarded annually to writers who are at least fifty years of age at the time of application to assist such writers who are just beginning their careers as speculative fiction writers. (We define professional writers as those who qualify for SFWA pro membership; anyone whose made below $1000 from their catalog of published work are considered early in their career and are therefore eligible for the grant). These funds may be used as each writer determines will best assist their work.
Olujic’s winning piece is What the Lakes Remember.
Maria B. Olujic, Ph.D., is an anthropologist and writer whose work bridges memory, migration, and myth. Born in communist Yugoslavia, she immigrated to the U.S. as a child, only to return decades later to serve as Deputy Minister of Science and Technology in wartime Croatia during the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her writing explores gendered violence, inherited silences, and the way landscapes carry story. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in AGNI, Brevity, 100 Word Story, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Panorama, Sky Island Journal, Plant-Human Quarterly, Catamaran, Beyond Words, and Penstricken, among others. She is currently completing her memoir, Fields of Lavender, Rivers of Fire: A Memoir of War, Womanhood, and Bearing Witness, which is under editorial review. When not writing, she tends lavender, oral history, and village rituals between California and her ancestral home in Croatia.
See more of her work at www.mariaolujic.com
