BenjaminL

Writer
Brisbane

Mentor: Matthew Condon

Benjamin Law is a Brisbane-based writer. He was first published as a 16-year-old, when a something he wrote was selected as Rolling Stone's Letter of the Month. They told him he'd won a stereo, but it never arrived. He then proceeded to aggressively hound Rolling Stone's head editor on the phone, every day, for two months'a stupid move in retrospect, but it meant he eventually got the stereo. Nowadays, he is senior contributor for the national glossy magazine frankie, where he writes about personal humiliations, and gets to interview his favourite authors and musicians. He also writes for the Courier Mail and the Big Issue, used to write for Scene and Voiceworks, edited QUT's student magazine Utopia, and founded a short-lived Brisbane arts journal called Vulture. In early 2008, he completed his PhD in television screenwriting at QUT, which involved writing a six-part black comedy series called The New Lows. He is also an academic tutor at QUT, where he teaches non-fiction writing. With novelist and Qweekend journalist Matthew Condon as his YAMP mentor, Benjamin hopes to expand his repertoire of non-fiction pieces and diversify his publishing portfolio. He is much nicer with magazine editors nowadays, and still uses the stereo he won from Rolling Stone.