Henshaw awarded inaugural Copyright Agency Author Fellowship

The Copyright Agency has awarded its inaugural $40,000 Author Fellowship to Mark Henshaw.

The fellowship, aimed at mid-to-late career authors, is one of several fellowships established by the Copyright Agency to mark its 40th anniversary in 2014.

Henshaw is the author of two novels, The Snow Kimono (Text), which won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2014, and Out of the Line of Fire (Text), which was published in 1988 and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He recently returned to writing full-time after working for many years as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia.

Henshaw will use the fellowship to complete work on his latest novel The Missing, ‘an existential thriller set both in France and Australia, about one man’s tenuous hold on his life and identity’. 

On the fellowship judging panel was the founding chair of the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund Committee Brian Johns, author Malcolm Knox and literary critic Geordie Williamson. The Copyright Agency said in a statement that the judges were ‘particularly excited by the extract of the novel for which [Henshaw] is seeking funding’, with Johns describing the author as ‘a powerful talent we want to survive, nurture and grow’.

The fellowship was announced at the Australian Society of Authors National Writers’ Congress dinner on 11 September.

Category: Local news