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On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship.
This year’s applications were assessed by Amal Awad and Kate Ryan, who selected five shortlisted applicants:
The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is offered annually to an Australian author to provide them with valuable time to work on a current manuscript. It is offered by the Blake-Beckett Trust, thanks to the generosity of one of our long-term members and supporters, Wendy Beckett. The prize pool was increased to $50,000 in 2023. The winner of the Scholarship will receive AU$35,000 and the runner-up will receive AU$15,000.
The winner and runner-up will be selected by Wendy Beckett of the Blake-Beckett Trust and announced on the ASA website on 11 December 2024.
“Social, environmental issues were at the fore of the submissions for this year’s Blake-Beckett Scholarship, with reflective excavations of Australian and world history also prominent.
The calibre of writing was incredibly high, with many award-winning authors submitting strong applications. This made our task of creating a shortlist extremely difficult. However, the shortlisted authors stood out for their creativity and confident prose, clear voices and ambitious professional development plans.”
– Amal Awad and Kate Ryan
Meg Caddy
In spare but evocative prose, and weaving together fantasy and history, Meg Caddy’s Dross Magic reimagines the events surrounding two historical witchcraft trials in Pendle, Lancashire, UK in the early 1600s. Through the lens of a very particular history it navigates enduring and contemporary themes – friendship between women, queerness and survivor’s guilt.
Delia Falconer
Whether fiction or non-fiction, Delia Falconer writes ambitiously and with conviction. Her triptych of novella-length stories, Novel-in-Stories, which includes The Kelp Orchard, continues her thoughtful explorations of history and human behaviour.
Mireille Juchau
In Mireille Juchau’s auto-fictional detective story Hosts and Guests, a journalist seeks answers to the disappearance of a relative after World War Two, while in vastly different circumstances her childhood friend goes missing. Alternating a first-person narrative with the lives of other characters in Germany, Italy and Sydney, and including fragments of ‘official history’ and speculative comment, Juchau’s work is formally inventive yet written with economy and verve.
Ronnie Scott
With Letter to a Fortunate Ex, Ronnie Scott demands the reader’s attention with a powerful opening that speaks to his strength as a writer of fully-formed characters. His area of concern – the legacy of HIV/AIDS – is also a valuable interrogation of our bodies.
Gretchen Shirm
In this reimagining of the character Arabella Donn from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, Gretchen Shirm has embarked on a compelling offer of an untold tale. With Shirm’s mesmerising prose, Arabella’s Ark will be a counter-narrative to the Arabella of the original novel, with a historical focus on women’s lives during the Victorian era in Sydney.
The Scholarship is open to writers of adult fiction in ANY genre, and writers of biography. Works of poetry, memoir, autobiography and children’s writing (including YA) are not eligible for this Scholarship.
To enter you must be a Full member of the ASA and have previously published a minimum of two books. These two books can be in any genre or category, but they must have been traditionally published.
Applicants must have a manuscript underway and be able to outline how they would benefit from this fellowship
