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The ASA is thrilled to share that Ann-Marie Priest is 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 is this year’s runner-up for his manuscript entitled A Calendar of Vandemonian Saints and will receive $15,000. The news was announced by Wendy Beckett at an ASA member event in Sydney on 28 October.
‘This year’s applications were outstanding and it was the most difficult year I can remember to judge in a long time. All of the books entered simply must be published. The winning two 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,’ says Wendy Beckett.
‘It makes me acutely aware yet again of how difficult a life it is for a writer to survive while writing a book. This shouldn’t be so; where would we be without writers? No books, theatre, film, TV, news? I hope the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship can go some way toward helping these very important writers to sustain themselves while they contribute to our lives in such a meaningful way.’
The winner and runner-up were picked by Wendy Beckett and the Blake-Beckett Trust from a shortlist of five authors, selected by assessors Shookofeh Azar and Elizabeth Tan:
ASA CEO Lucy Hayward says, ‘Congratulations to Ann-Marie Priest and Lenny Bartulin – both are accomplished writers with fascinating works-in-progress. Writing demands many things of authors, most significantly, their time. We’re delighted to be able to gift authors that time through this scholarship, thanks to the generous support of Wendy Beckett and the Blake-Beckett Trust.’
Ann-Marie Priest says, ‘I couldn’t be more delighted to receive the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship. It is such a wonderful gift for any writer to be able to make a new book project their sole priority for a time, and I feel immensely grateful for this opportunity. I offer my warmest thanks to the ASA, the Blake-Beckett Trust, the stalwart judges who chose the shortlist, and Wendy Beckett, who whittled it down to two. I thank them especially for considering biographers for this scholarship as well as fiction writers, which is such a welcome affirmation of the place of biography in the Australian literary sphere.’
Lenny Bartulin says, ‘The Blake-Beckett Scholarship is a tremendous initiative and a terrific support for writers, particularly in increasingly difficult times for the written word. I am deeply grateful and honoured to have been awarded the runner-up prize, in what was a shortlist of wonderfully talented fellow writers. It is a rare privilege now to be able to dedicate purposeful time and singularly committed energies to my writing, and I thank the Blake-Beckett Scholarship, Wendy Beckett, and the ASA for their generosity and continuing dedication to Australian writing.’
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.
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.
Ann-Marie Priest is the author of the first biography of renowned Australian poet Gwen Harwood, My Tongue Is My Own (2022), and recipient of the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Her book A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century was shortlisted for the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award. She is a senior lecturer at Central Queensland University.
Lenny Bartulin is the author of six novels, including Infamy (2013), Fortune (2019), and most recently The Unearthed (2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize and longlisted in the 2024 Tasmanian Literary Awards for the Premier’s Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated and published in Brazil and the US, and his poetry and prose has appeared in HEAT, Meanjin, and Island magazines.
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 the ASA’s longtime members and supporters, Wendy Beckett. The winner of the scholarship will receive AU$35,000 and the runner-up will receive AU$15,000.
