Copyright Agency awards record $240,000 in fellowships

29 November 2018 Books+Publishing

The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund has awarded a total of $240,000 for three fellowships.

Melbourne writer Jeff Sparrow was awarded the $80,000 author fellowship for his project ‘Thinking Differently: Other minds and the challenge of climate change’. Sparrow’s new book aims to reframe discussions of humanity’s relationship with the natural world in the context of climate change.

Sparrow said he is happy to be given time to write through the fellowship. ‘I am writing about such an obviously important subject, but it’s also one that’s very difficult to address, simply because the scale of the crisis overwhelms us. The bleakness of environmental news can foster despair and disengagement; we need desperately a new way to frame the topic without minimising the problems we face. It’s such an honour to be acknowledged by industry peers and I’m looking forward to getting to work on this project,’ said Sparrow.

The inaugural fellowship for nonfiction, worth $80,000, was awarded to literary critic and academic Bernadette Brennan, who will use the fellowship to research and write a significant biography on Australian short-story writer Gillian Mears. Brennan’s most recent book, A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text), recently won the 2018 CHASS Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 National Biography Award.

Brennan said she was ‘honoured’ to be the inaugural recipient of the nonfiction fellowship, adding that the fellowship is ‘a vote of confidence’ in her endeavour to establish Mears as one of the great writers of the late 20th century.

Indigenous artist Karla Dickens was awarded the $80,000 fellowship for a visual artist.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, Kathryn Heyman won the 2017 author fellowship, with previous winners including Melissa Lucashenko in 2016 and Mark Henshaw in 2015.

For more information on the recipients, see the Copyright Agency website.

Category: Awards Local news