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MIN READ
On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship.
This year’s applications were assessed by Shokoofeh Azar and Elizabeth Tan, who selected five shortlisted applicants:
Our warm congratulations to the shortlisted authors, and thanks to the assessors who had no small task in assessing over 70 applications – the largest number of applications to date.
The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is presented 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 winner of the scholarship will receive $35,000, with the runner-up set to receive $15,000.
The winner and runner-up will be selected from the shortlist by the Blake-Beckett Trust and announced on Tuesday 28 October at the ASA’s NSW member event at Gleebooks, and on our website.
With humour and warmth, Lenny Bartulin’s A Calendar of Vandemonian Saints imagines the lives of modern ‘saints’, whose small, idiosyncratic acts of grace are memorialised in a series of hagiographies. The prose in this unique project is both delightful and powerful, grounded in historical awareness and the study of classical works.
In Mark Brandi’s Joyrider, a stolen car threatens to undermine a family living in precarity. The sharply-written synopsis and excerpt promise a highly tangible, engaging, and compelling socio-literary novel with strong dramatic and human potential, delivered by an author whose track record shows a depth of reflection and focus on social and cultural issues.
Taking place over two days at an Easter family gathering in 1946, Kate Kruimink’s All Throat sees its tender characters devise creative means of communicating with each other when words fail them. This multilayered story in a closed, theatrical setting will engage the reader on two levels: the narrative and surface layer, as well as the hidden psychological and philosophical layer.
Kate McCaffrey’s The Whitney Files is a psychological crime story about a charismatic foster teen insinuating herself in a well-to-do family. Supported by McCaffrey’s expertise and rigorous research, and with prose that thrums with tension, this project stands out for its pointed contrast between the main character’s innocent façade and her violent inner world.
Ann-Marie Priest’s Tell it Slant: The Life and Loves of Henry Handel Richardson offers a fresh and rarely seen portrait of a significant author to early twentieth-century Australian literature, bringing to the forefront aspects of Richardson’s gender identity and personal relationships that have previously been overlooked or dismissed. Priest, with proven research experience and clear, nimble expression, promises to deliver a valuable and impactful biography.
