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Hall, Kneen receive $80k Copyright Agency fellowships

The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund has awarded three fellowships totalling $240,000. Writers Rodney Hall and Krissy Kneen and visual artist Khaled Sabsabi will each receive $80,000 to create new works.

Hall received the Author Fellowship for Vortex, an experimental novel set in 1954, the year when the first ‘boat people’ set out from Vietnam to Australia. Hall will structure the novel as a web of connections rather than a linear narrative, inviting the reader to read the chapters in any order. The Copyright Agency said that ‘preferred publisher’ Picador is ‘eagerly awaiting the book’.

Kneen received the Fellowship for Non-Fiction Writing to research and write the first draft of With This Body, a mix of memoir and nonfiction ‘exploring her own personal relationship with her body and the societal pressures and stressors of living in a fat, post-menopausal femme body’. Text will publish the book in 2022.

Kneen said, ‘It is incredibly moving and emotional for me to be chosen for this fellowship. This funding has given me the confidence to pursue wholeheartedly a really difficult subject.’

Sabsabi received the Fellowship for a Visual Artist for his project ‘A Hope’.

Copyright Agency CEO Adam Suckling said the selection process for this year’s fellowships was ‘extremely competitive’.

‘Given the impact the funding will have at this time,the selection of just one recipient for each fellowship was extremely difficult, but it demonstrates the rich and diverse talent within the Australian creative sector and highlights the compelling need for funding for Australian writers and artists,’ said Suckling.

 

Category: Awards Local news