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Member only guide to the Australian book industry.
The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship 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. The prize pool was increased to $50,000 in 2023. The winner of the Scholarship will receive AU$35,000 and the runner-up will receive AU$15,000.
The Scholarship is open to writers of adult fiction in ANY genre, and writers of biography. Works of poetry, memoir, autobiography and children’s writing (including YA) are not eligible for this Scholarship.
To enter you must be a Full member of the ASA and have previously published a minimum of two books. These two books can be in any genre or category, but they must have been traditionally published.
Applicants must have a manuscript underway and be able to outline how they would benefit from this fellowship.
Applications open
9 July 2025, 9am AEST
Applications close
11 August 2025, 5pm AEST
Announcement of the winner
28 October 2025
The scholarship is open to only current Full members of the ASA. Not a member? Join here. Associate members can upgrade to Full membership here.
Applicants will be asked to provide two documents: a statement and a sample.
The statement consists of:
(a) no more than 500 words explaining how this grant money would benefit you;
(b) your author biography, including an overview of your publishing history, of no more than 150 words;
(c) a synopsis of your manuscript of no more than 250 words
The sample consists of:
(d) a small sample of your Manuscript of no more than 5 pages.
Documents must be submitted in 12 point, double-spaced in Word Document format.
On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2024 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship, Mireille Juchau, and the runner-up Gretchen Shirm.
This year’s applications were assessed by Amal Awad and Kate Ryan, who selected five shortlisted applicants:
Meg Caddy
Delia Falconer
Mireille Juchau
Ronnie Scott
Gretchen Shirm
ASA CEO Lucy Hayward says, “My sincere congratulations to Mireille Juchau and Gretchen Shirm, two talented writers so deserving of this scholarship. The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is a real game-changer, offering meaningful support for authors to take much-needed time to write, and over the years we’ve seen what its enabled its recipients to achieve. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to Wendy Beckett and the Trust for this huge gift to Australian writers.”
Mireille Juchau says, “I am surprised and honoured to receive the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship among a shortlist of authors I admire. During this period of great precarity for many in the arts, this visionary fund offers financial relief and rare time out from multiple demands to focus on my fourth novel. Thank you Wendy Beckett, for recognising that a lifelong creative practice needs unbroken space for formal experimentation, refining technique, for dreaming. My gratitude to judges Amal Awad and Kate Ryan, to the ASA, and the Blake-Beckett Trust for fostering our vital literary culture.”
Gretchen Shirm says, “I’m honoured to have won second-place amid such an impressive field of writers. This money will help to support my research into the lives of women in 1880s Sydney, and the reimagining of the life of Arabella Donn from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. I’m incredibly grateful to Wendy Beckett for offering this crucial source of support in a time of ever diminishing arts funding.”
In Mireille Juchau’s auto-fictional detective story Hosts and Guests, a journalist seeks answers to the disappearance of a relative after World War Two, while in vastly different circumstances her childhood friend goes missing. Alternating a first-person narrative with the lives of other characters in Germany, Italy and Sydney, and including fragments of ‘official history’ and speculative comment, Juchau’s work is formally inventive yet written with economy and verve.
In this reimagining of the character Arabella Donn from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, Gretchen Shirm has embarked on a compelling offer of an untold tale. With Shirm’s mesmerising prose, Arabella’s Ark will be a counter-narrative to the Arabella of the original novel, with a historical focus on women’s lives during the Victorian era in Sydney.
Mireille Juchau is the author of three novels. The World Without Us (Bloomsbury Australia, US & UK) won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for five awards. Burning In (Giramondo, Sydney, 2007) was shortlisted for four awards. In 2020 Mireille won the Walkley Pascall Prize for arts writing. Her essays and reviews appear in LA Review of Books, HEAT Magazine, New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, LitHub, The Monthly and more. In 2017 Mireille was Charles Perkins Writer in Residence.
Gretchen Shirm is a Sydney-based author and critic. Her novels Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room were both shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the New South Wales Premier’s Awards. Her short fiction has been anthologised in Meanjin, Overland, Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories. Her third novel, Out of the Woods, which draws on testimony given at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, is being published in April 2025.
On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2023 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship, Emily Bitto and runner-up, Kate Mildenhall.
This year’s applications were assessed by Mirandi Riwoe and Anna Spargo-Ryan, who selected four shortlisted applicants:
Emily Bitto
Kate Mildenhall
Kirli Saunders
Michael Winkler
ASA CEO Olivia Lanchester says, “Huge congratulations to Emily Bitto and runner-up Kate Mildenhall, two brilliant writers whose important work will be fuelled by this scholarship. The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is a real joy for the ASA to promote. It is meaningful support for a writer to work on their manuscript and we have watched – with delight – as the scholarship has allowed past winners to publish amazing fiction. Our deepest thanks to Wendy Beckett for her role in giving Australian writers that greatest of gifts – time to write.”
Emily Bitto says, “I am incredibly grateful, encouraged, honoured and overjoyed to have been awarded the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship. This scholarship will make an enormous difference to me – materially, of course, but also in terms of my confidence in this project, which is very dear to my heart. I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to the judges, the ASA, and in particular to the Blake-Beckett Trust for providing such generous support for Australian literature and culture.”
Kate Mildenhall says, “One of the most precious gifts a writer can receive is funding for time to write. In an era of ever-dwindling arts funding, it is especially significant that Wendy Blake-Beckett offers this opportunity. I’m thrilled to share the Blake Beckett Trust shortlist with these wonderful writers and their projects, and honoured to have been selected for second prize.”
Emily Bitto’s Reasons to Leave is a multi-protagonist novel about a wave of Czechoslovakian migrants to the western suburbs of Melbourne. The writing is assured and touching, engaging with themes to do with belonging and labour. Bitto’s work will explore storytelling’s power to enrich both personal and national identity.
Kate Mildenhall’s We Bought a Town is a contemporary thriller set over three days and told from the perspective of nine characters. The novel engages with ideas concerning society’s fracturing values about how to deal with family and the land. The scope of this work is ambitious and exciting, and the judges were immediately impressed with the synopsis and writing.
Emily Bitto is an award-winning and widely published writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She has a Masters in literary studies and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne. Her debut novel, The Strays, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and the published novel went on to win the Stella Prize in 2015. Emily’s second novel, Wild Abandon, was published in 2021 by Allen and Unwin, and was the winner of the prestigious Margaret and Colin Roderick Award in 2022. Emily has taught literary studies and creative writing at various institutions over the past decade, and is currently a tutor and course advisor at the Faber Writing Academy.
Kate Mildenhall is an author and podcaster. Her debut novel Skylarking was longlisted for Debut Fiction in The Indie Book Awards 2017 and the 2017 Voss Literary Award. Her second novel, The Mother Fault was longlisted for the 2021 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2021 Aurealis Science Fiction Novel of the Year. Her latest novel is The Hummingbird Effects. With writer Katherine Collette, Kate co-hosts The First Time Podcast – conversations with Australian writers – a podcast now in its sixth season. Kate is currently working on her fourth novel and undertaking a PhD in creative practice at RMIT University. Her first picture book will be released in 2024.
On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2022 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship, Ashley Hay.
This year’s applications were assessed by Shankari Chandran and Jennifer Mills, who selected the three shortlisted applicants:
Ashley Hay
Julienne van Loon
The judges were impressed by the exceptionally high standard of entries and felt that each of three shortlisted authors would have been a worthy winner.
Ashley Hay’s The Running Dream is an intriguing exploration of the subconscious in the era of climate crisis. The writing demonstrates a sophisticated project that promises to contribute meaningfully to the growing body of Australian climate fiction. Hay deftly navigates the shifting space between anxiety and optimism, resignation and resistance, with a cast of engaging and surprising characters.
Gretchen Shirm’s Blue Chair is an exciting work of testimonial fiction about the impacts of war crimes, based on her experiences working at the International Criminal Tribunal. A well-developed and deeply considered proposal which positions Australian characters in a global context. The Blue Chair explores a terrible period in recent history using these specific injustices to interrogate the universal and ongoing trauma of war.
Julienne van Loon’s Who is the city for? engages with ideas that are deeply relevant to contemporary democracy, such as the housing crisis, public space, intersectional privilege and community life. Interesting, engaging writing with a strong political impact, the extract demonstrates the power of literature in activism. The project is ambitious in its intellectual reach without losing any intimacy in its story-telling.
Ashley Hay’s work has been praised for its ‘intelligent scrutiny of the human psyche’, ‘a tenderness that is deeply compelling’ and its ‘simple grace’. Her previous novels – The Body in the Clouds, The Railwayman’s Wife and A Hundred Small Lessons – have received various prizes and nominations and been published internationally and in translation; a revised and expanded edition of her narrative non-fiction Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions, was published in 2021. She works as a writer, editor, facilitator and mentor, and has published in journals and anthologies including Cosmos, The Guardian, Reading Like an Australian Writer and Living in the Anthropocene. Between 2018 and 2022 she was the editor of Griffith Review.
Four shortlisted applicants were selected for the 2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship: Michelle Aung Thin, Kate Holden, Gretchen Shirm and Laura Woollett.
Michelle Aung Thin is the recipient of the 2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship with her winning entry The Japanese Photographer.
The shortlisted applicants for the 2020 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship are Aoife Clifford, Eleanor Limprecht and Mark Smith.
Eleanor Limprecht is the recipient of the 2020 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship with her winning entry The Coast.
The shortlist for the 2019 inaugural Blake-Beckett Trust scholarship included Shankari Chandran, Leah Kaminsky and Julienne van Loon.
The winner was announced as Shankari Chandran at the ASA Christmas Party on 11 December 2019.
