ASA announces 2025 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship shortlist

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced the 2025 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship shortlist.

Chosen from over 70 applicants, the shortlisted authors are:

• Lenny Bartulin for ‘A Calendar of Vandemonian Saints’
• Mark Brandi for ‘Joyrider’
• Kate Kruimink for ‘All Throat’
• Kate McCaffrey for ‘The Whitney Files’
• Ann-Marie Priest for ‘Tell it Slant: The Life and Loves of Henry Handel Richardson’.

The annual scholarship is given to an Australian author ‘to provide them with valuable time to work on a current manuscript,’ said organisers. The winner of the scholarship will receive $35,000, and a runner-up will receive $15,000.

Assessors Shokoofeh Azar and Elizabeth Tan commended Bartulin’s entry for its ‘humour and warmth’ and ‘delightful and powerful’ prose; Brandi’s ‘Joyrider’ as ‘a highly tangible, engaging, and compelling socio-literary novel’; Kruimink’s work as a ‘multilayered story in a closed, theatrical setting [that] will engage the reader’; McCaffrey’s ‘The Whitney Files’ for ‘prose that thrums with tension’; and Priest’s entry for ‘clear, nimble expression’ and the promise ‘to deliver a valuable and impactful biography’.

The winner and runner-up will be announced on Tuesday, 28 October at the ASA’s NSW member event at Gleebooks.

Last year’s winner was Mireille Juchau for ‘Hosts and Guests’; Gretchen Shirm was also announced as runner-up for ‘Arabella’s Ark’.

More information about the scholarship is available on the ASA website.

Category: Awards Local news