Affirm signs an inaugural Varuna Mentorship Award winner

Affirm Press has acquired the rights to Paula Keogh’s memoir The Green Bell after Keogh was one of three winners of its inaugural Varuna Mentorship Award announced in October last year.

As part of the prize Keogh received manuscript development from Affirm Press editors Ruby Ashby-Orr and Kate Goldsworthy while in residence at Varuna.

The Green Bell is a story of ‘grief and mental illness, and of love and survival’. Beginning university in Canberra 40 years ago, Keogh ‘lost her best friend to a psychiatric institution and then suffered her own mental breakdowns’. ‘In an institution she met and fell deeply in love with a fellow patient, the poet Michael Dransfield … but their relationship didn’t follow a smooth road, and Paula was left to move forward on her own’.

Affirm publishing director Martin Hughes said he’s ‘delighted that the award has already proved a worthwhile investment’.

Entries for this year’s mentorship program are now open. For more information, click here.

Category: Local news