Priest wins Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced Ann-Marie Priest as the 2025 recipient of the $35,000 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship for her biography “Tell It Slant: The Life and Loves of Henry Handel Richardson”.
Lenny Bartulin was named runner-up for his manuscript “A Calendar of Vandemonian Saints” and will receive $15,000.
The winner and runner-up were announced by prize founder Wendy Beckett at an ASA member event in Sydney on 28 October.
Said Beckett, “The winning 2 entrants should be obligatory reading, and it is hard to think they might not have been written at all. Both were intriguing, beautifully written, and so worthy.”
A senior lecturer at Central Queensland University, Priest is the author of My Tongue Is My Own (Black Inc., 2022) and received the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Her book A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (UWAP, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award.
Assessors described Priest’s manuscript as “a fresh and rarely seen portrait of a significant author to early 20th-century Australian literature, bringing to the forefront aspects of Richardson’s gender identity and personal relationships that have previously been overlooked or dismissed”.
They noted, “Priest, with proven research experience and clear, nimble expression, promises to deliver a valuable and impactful biography.”
Bartulin is the author of 6 novels including Infamy (A&U, 2013), Fortune (A&U, 2019) and, most recently, The Unearthed (A&U, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize and longlisted for the Premier’s Prize for Fiction in the 2024 Tasmanian Literary Awards.
Of Bartulin’s manuscript, assessors said, “The prose in this unique project is both delightful and powerful, grounded in historical awareness and the study of classical works.”
Priest and Bartulin were chosen from a shortlist of 5, selected by assessors Shookofeh Azar and Elizabeth Tan.
The annual scholarship is given to an Australian author to provide them with valuable time to work on a current manuscript.
Last year’s winner was Mireille Juchau for her autofictional detective story “Hosts and Guests”.
Category: Awards Local news
