2021 Hazel Rowley Fellowship opens
Applications are now open for the 2021 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
Now in its tenth year, the Fellowship established to commemorate the life, ideas and writing of Hazel Rowley (1951–2011) will award $15,000 to an Australian writer to support the research and development of a new biographical work.
“The awarding of the Fellowship in March 2021 is especially poignant as it will mark 10 years since my sister Hazel died and when we established the Fellowship in her name,” said Della Rowley, Hazel’s sister. “It’s exciting to see recent publications coming from our Fellows. It’s also a wonderful testament to Hazel’s legacy to see their books winning awards.”
Jacqueline Kent, the 2018 Fellowship winner, whose biography ‘Vida Goldstein: A Woman For Our Time’ was published by Penguin Books in September 2020, said, “My first and greatest debt of gratitude is to the Hazel Rowley Fellowship, the generous award that enabled me to work full time on this book.”
This year, we welcome a new judge, writer and cultural historian Maria Tumarkin. Maria won the Best Writing Award in the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her book ‘Axiomatic’, and we are delighted she will join Jeff Sparrow, as guest judges for the 2021 Fellowship. We would like to thank Jenny Hocking who has been a magnificent judge with us for the past four years.
The Fellowship, which is administered by Writers Victoria, is open to Australian writers of biography or writers working on an aspect of cultural or social history compatible with Hazel’s own interests (see www.hazelrowley.com). The Fellowship encourages writers to immerse themselves in their subject’s life and culture. It may be used to fund research or travel, to develop a new proposal or progress a manuscript for submission to potential publishers.
Applicants can apply online at Writers Victoria until the closing date, 16 November 2020: https://writersvictoria.org.au/node/283
The winner of the Fellowship will be announced at Adelaide Writers Week in March 2021, following the Hazel Rowley Memorial lecture.
About Hazel Rowley
Before her untimely death in 2011, Hazel wrote four critically acclaimed biographies: ‘Christina Stead: A Biography’ (1993), ‘Richard Wright: The Life and Times’ (2001), ‘Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’ (2005) and ‘Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage’ (2010). Erudite and accessible, these studies brought fresh attention to the lives and works of significant figures both nationally and internationally.
“My books are about people who had the courage to break out of their confined world and help others to do the same,” she said.