Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship to end in 2026

The Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship will conclude in 2026.

In a joint email from the Hazel Rowley Fellowship committee and Writers Victoria, organisers said, ‘It is with some sadness, but also with enormous pride in our achievement, that we announce that the 2026 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship will be the last.’

Rowley was the author of four biographies: Christina Stead: A Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1993), Richard Wright: The Life and Times (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Chatto and Windus, 2005) and Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (Melbourne University Press, 2010). She died in 2011.

The Hazel Rowley literary Fellowship was created by Rowley’s sister Della Rowley and friends Lynn Buchanan and Irene Tomaszewski to ‘honour Hazel as a skilled biographer and to encourage others to write with the same care and enthusiasm in this time-consuming and exacting genre’, and is awarded to ‘encourage Australian authors to attain a high standard of biography writing’.

The inaugural fellowship, awarded in 2012, went to Mary Hoban for a biography of Julia Arnold. Over the 14 year span of the fellowship, twenty writers have shared in more than $300,000 in support for travel and research, said organisers.

Michelle Staff won the 2025 fellowship for a proposed joint biography of sisters Bessie Rischbieth and Olive Evans. Previous winners include Maxine Beneba Clarke for The Hate Race (Hachette, 2016), Stephanie Steggall for Interestingly Enough… : The Life of Tom Keneally (Nero, 2015) and Matthew Lamb for Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths (Knopf, 2023).

Applications for the final fellowship will open on 1 October 2025, with the winner planned to be announced on 4 March 2026, as part of Adelaide Writers Week.

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