September 2, 2025 Submissions
General Expert Panel Comments
Comments made by the panel during its assessment of applications submitted to the September 2, 2025 deadline are outlined below. Please note that these comments provide a summary of the panel's assessment and do not necessarily relate to every individual application submitted to this deadline. The panel does not provide individual comments.
Project description
- Name your project with a specific title and not a generic label like “AFA Literary Arts Application.” Please also name files according to the attachment naming format as per the guidelines.
- It is essential for applicants to make a compelling argument for including literary activities like travel, conferences, workshops, and courses in their projects. Rationale should demonstrate how these activities are vital to the applicant’s project/career development.
- Applications should only include the requested items. Addition of extra materials or documents does not necessarily strengthen an application.
- The project description should include a realistic timeline that supports the activities described in the project description as well as in the budget. The project should be able to be reasonably completed in the projected timeline. Projects that broke large amounts of work into stages or phases were assessed favourably.
- The panel appreciated projects that included appropriate research and development time.
- Outcomes and impact should be clear. Pay attention to assessment criteria in the guidelines.
- Applications that provided evidence of a willingness to learn about or an existing understanding of the publishing industry were assessed positively.
- The panel appreciated applications that were proof-read. Read, review, and edit applications prior to submission. Give yourself ample time to complete and review your application. Clean, easy to read applications that followed the program guidelines in format were appreciated.
- Please be in touch with the AFA grants development consultant and utilise grant writing resources on the AFA website prior to submission.
Budget
- It is important to submit a clear, realistic budget. Use notes to explain units, quotes, how expense estimates were arrived at, for example. Detailed budgets were appreciated.
- The panel appreciated budgets that paid artists appropriately and did not undervalue the applicants' or other contributors' time and expertise.
- Please review the guidelines and contact AFA arts development staff for questions about eligible expenses. Eligible subsistence expenses are housing, local transportation, food, childcare, dependent care, up to $3,000/month.
Support material
- Support material that included samples of the current project was useful to the assessors.
- Reference letters and letters of support were positive additions, when relevant to the project and evaluation criteria.
- Please consider formatting and legibility of support material when submitting and stay within the required page limits. Be intentional about the support material submitted with your application.