Stella Prize partners with Vic govt, Australian Writers’ Week in China
The Stella Prize has announced two partnerships, one with the Victorian government to run literature workshops for secondary schools and the other with the Australian Writers’ Week program in China.
The Victorian government has awarded a $50,000 grant to the Stella Schools Program to run a pilot program of ‘intensive writers camps’ in six regional and disadvantaged schools in Victoria.
The ‘Stella Writing Camp: Towards Gender Equality through Literature’ program will place authors in schools for a week to do a series of talks and workshops, aimed at teaching students in years seven to 10 how to ‘recognise gender stereotypes in the books they read’ and to ‘imagine a future not limited by their gender’. The camps will be run at no cost to the schools.
Stella Prize executive director Aviva Tuffield told Books+Publishing: ‘It is an incredible endorsement to have this support from the Victorian Government and we thank them for their vision and their commitment to gender equality’.
The grant will also expand the Stella Schools Program’s ‘Girls Write Up’ workshops, which encourage students to read more critically and imagine a future not limited by their gender.
The Stella Schools program, which offers resources, workshops, teaching notes and school visits for secondary schools, has also recently expanded. The program launched in Western Australia at the Perth Writers Festival, and will launch in Queensland on 10 March at the Gold Coast’s Somerset Celebration of Literature, and in the ACT on 17 March at Canberra’s Noted experimental writing festival.
The Stella Prize is also collaborating with Australian Writers’ Week in China to promote Australian women’s writing, with 2014 Stella Prize-winner Clare Wright visiting this year’s event in March as a representative of the Stella Prize.
‘It is now five years since the Stella Prize was first conceived and the organisation goes from strength to strength,’ said Tuffield.
Tags: chinastellaprize
Category: Junior Local news
