ASA Announces Picture Book Illustrators’ Grants

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced five recipients of Picture Book Illustrators’ Initiative Grants for 2012. The initiative ‘aims to establish a “best-practice” methodology for assessing applications from picture book illustrators for the Australia Council’s New Work funding category’.

The Assessment Panel considered over 100 applications from 92 illustrators and awarded grants in three categories – Emerging, Developing and Established. The Emerging Illustrator’s grant of $5,000 went to Trace Balla and further grant was awarded to Craig Phillips. In the Developing category, Caroline Magerl received $10,000 and Judy Watson, $5,000. The recipient of the $15,000 Established Illustrator’s grant is Narelle Oliver.

To see the full list of shortlisted illustrators, go to the Australian Society of Authors website. And to enjoy some of the emerging artists' work, see Trace Balla's photostream on Flickr and Craig Phillip's illustrations on his website.

National Biography Award to ANU Historian

Dr Martin Thomas, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History at The Australian National University, is the winner of the 2012 National Biography Award. Thomas won the $25,000 award for his 2011 biography, The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist.

Mathews was a nineteenth-century surveyor and anthropologist who produced a large volume of writing resulting from his field investigations into Indigenous communities in New South Wales.

Alex Byrne, the NSW State Librarian, commented that Thomas’s ‘forensic research’ and ‘superb writing’ produced a biography that reminds Australians of Mathews’s ‘immense contribution’ as an ‘outstanding early investigator of our first peoples and their cultures’.

One of the National Biography Award judges, Peter Rose, said that Thomas’s biography stood out ‘because of its originality, its immense detail and scholarship, and its luminous engagement with his subject’. (NSW State Library media release, 14 May 2012)

For further information on the National Biography Award, click here. To learn more about R. H. Mathews, view his biographical entry at the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.
 

Josephine Ulrick Winners Announced

The winners of the 2012 Josephine Ulrick prizes have been announced in Queensland. The prizes, for a short story and for poetry, are administered by Griffith University's School of Humanities.

The 2012 literature prize was awarded to Matthew Lamb, editor of the Review of Australian Fiction, for his short story ‘Long Grass over Home’. Lamb describes his story as revealing what happens when you ‘lift the crust of the dung heap and let the stench rise’.

Melbourne writer Maria Zajkowski has won the poetry prize for the second year running. In 2011, a suite of poems from her manuscript ‘The Ascendant’ won the award; this year, another suite from the same manuscript has taken out the $20,000 prize. Zajkowksi says her poems are ‘about existence, and that death is not non-existence. They focus on gain as much as loss, and how inseparable these two things are.’ (Griffith University media release, 4 May 2012)

Zajkowski will use her prize money to spend some time in Europe; Lamb hopes his win will ‘help legitimise his work, particularly with the [Review of Australian Fiction] to promote and disseminate Australian fiction and short stories.

More information on the Josephine Ulrick prizes is available on the award website.

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