2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship Winner Announced

15.12.21

On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship.

The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is worth $20,000 and is offered annually to an Australian author to provide them with valuable time to work on a current manuscript. It is offered by the Blake-Beckett Trust, thanks to the generosity of one of our long-term members and supporters, Wendy Beckett.

We received a substantial 63 applications this year, which were assessed by Nigel Feathersone and Peggy Frew. The assessors selected four shortlisted applicants:

Michelle Aung Thin

Kate Holden

Gretchen Shirm

Laura Woollett

We would like to introduce Wendy Beckett of the Blake-Beckett Trust to announce the winner of the 2021 Scholarship:

Kate Holden’s The Sin Eater is a refreshingly ambitious project with an incredible idea at its core. Holden is clearly a significant Australian writer and the extract is very fine indeed, displaying an adventurous spirit.

In Giants, Gretchen Shirm uses her lived experience of working as in intern at the United Nations to write a war-crimes novel, which has the potential to be a significant addition to Australian and world literature. The application is very clear in purpose, and the extract shows a work that is already at an advanced stage of development.

In West Girls, Laura Woollett maps an international novel-in-stories, informed by her own experience growing up Anglo-Maltese-Indonesian in Western Australia. Woollett’s scope is ambitious and her prose is close, daring and super sharp, with moment of delicious, awkward humour.

The winning entry, Michelle Aung Thin’s The Japanese Photographer, crackles with energy and promise. The author’s long-term fascination and in-depth engagement with her subject matter – the historical and ongoing complexity of Yangon/Rangoon – is evident, and the writing is highly accessible, clear and immediate.

Congratulations to Michelle Aung Thin, recipient of the 2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship!

Michelle Aung Thin

Michelle Aung Thin was born in Rangoon, Burma, grew up in Ottawa, Canada and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her first novel, The Monsoon Bride was published by Text (2011) and her most recent book, Hasina (Allen & Unwin 2019) was published in Canada and the USA as Crossing the Farak River (Annick 2020). Michelle is Anglo-Burmese and her ancestors come from Burma, India (West Bengal) as well as Ireland, Germany and Holland. She writes about hidden and overlooked histories and identities. She has worked as an Advertising Copywriter and now teaches in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Nigel Featherstone

Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer who has been published widely. His war novel, BODIES OF MEN, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, runner-up for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards, and received a 2019 Canberra Critics Circle Award. Nigel’s new novel, MY HEART IS A LITTLE WILD THING, will be published by Ultimo Press in May 2022. Nigel also writes for the stage, as well as short fiction, criticism and creative non-fiction, with work appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canberra Times, Meanjin, and the Chicago Quarterly Review, among other outlets.

Peggy Free

Peggy Frew is a writer and musician who lives in Melbourne. Her work has been published in The Age, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Qantas Magazine, NGV Magazine and The Big Issue. She was the winner of The Age short story competition in 2008. Her first novel, House of Sticks (2011, Scribe), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel (2015, Scribe), won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel Islands (2019, Allen and Unwin), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.