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On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the winner and runner-up of the 2024 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship.
This year’s applications were assessed by Amal Awad and Kate Ryan, who selected five shortlisted applicants:
We would like to introduce Wendy Beckett of the Blake-Beckett Trust to announce the winner and runner-up of the 2024 Scholarship:
ASA CEO Lucy Hayward says, “My sincere congratulations to Mireille Juchau and Gretchen Shirm, two talented writers so deserving of this scholarship. The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is a real game-changer, offering meaningful support for authors to take much-needed time to write, and over the years we’ve seen what its enabled its recipients to achieve. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to Wendy Beckett and the Trust for this huge gift to Australian writers.”
Mireille Juchau says, “I am surprised and honoured to receive the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship among a shortlist of authors I admire. During this period of great precarity for many in the arts, this visionary fund offers financial relief and rare time out from multiple demands to focus on my fourth novel. Thank you Wendy Beckett, for recognising that a lifelong creative practice needs unbroken space for formal experimentation, refining technique, for dreaming. My gratitude to judges Amal Awad and Kate Ryan, to the ASA, and the Blake-Beckett Trust for fostering our vital literary culture.”
Gretchen Shirm says, “I’m honoured to have won second-place amid such an impressive field of writers. This money will help to support my research into the lives of women in 1880s Sydney, and the reimagining of the life of Arabella Donn from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. I’m incredibly grateful to Wendy Beckett for offering this crucial source of support in a time of ever diminishing arts funding.”
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.
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.
Mireille Juchau is the author of three novels. The World Without Us (Bloomsbury Australia, US & UK) won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for five awards. Burning In (Giramondo, Sydney, 2007) was shortlisted for four awards. In 2020 Mireille won the Walkley Pascall Prize for arts writing. Her essays and reviews appear in LA Review of Books, HEAT Magazine, New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, LitHub, The Monthly and more. In 2017 Mireille was Charles Perkins Writer in Residence.
Gretchen Shirm is a Sydney-based author and critic. Her novels Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room were both shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the New South Wales Premier’s Awards. Her short fiction has been anthologised in Meanjin, Overland, Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories. Her third novel, Out of the Woods, which draws on testimony given at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, is being published in April 2025.
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 winner of the Scholarship will receive AU$35,000 and the runner-up will receive AU$15,000.
