SLV 2017 Creative Fellowships announced

The State Library of Victoria (SLV) has announced the recipients of its 2017 Creative and Specialist Fellowships, including several writers working on book projects.

The recipients of the Creative Fellowships, worth $12,000 over three months, are:

• Kelly Gardiner for ‘Sisterhood: Feminists in the Family’, ‘a work of history and memoir tracing two generations of Victorian women’
• Lucy Sussex for ‘The Mean Streets of Old Melbourne: The Crime Writing and True Crime of Mary and George Fortune’, ‘a research project on Mary Fortune, a pioneering detective author in the late 1800s and her criminal son, George’
• Robert Reid for ‘Mostly Untrue (The Exaggerated Life of George Coppin)’, ‘a new play script that explores the life and career of one of the founders of live theatre in Melbourne’
• Martin King for ‘Where the wildlife falls’, ‘a series of etchings and an immersive virtual reality environment that explore and evaluate the native flora and fauna in William Strutt’s painting, Black Thursday, February 6th 1851’
• Texta Queen for ‘Poster child’, ‘a series of artworks to be made into a poster series’.

An honorary Creative Fellowship was also awarded to Yasmin Kelsall for ‘Private Property—an exploration of human influence on the Victorian landscape’, ‘a research project exploring themes that have shaped Victoria, the most cleared state in Australia’.

The following Specialist Fellowships were also awarded:

Centenary of WWI Fellowship ($15,000)

• Deborah McKay for ‘Patsy Adam Smith: The Anzac Interviews’, ‘a series of six podcasts based on the oral history collection of interviews of WWI veterans recorded by Patsy Adam Smith from 1976-78’

Children’s Literature Fellowship ($15,000)

• Lili Wilkinson for ‘The Wild Kindness’, ‘a young adult novel that confronts the trope of the missing girl and restores agency to the lost girls of literature in a postmodern feminist reclamation’

Digital Fellowship ($15,000)

• Natalie Wallis and Anthony Mockler for ‘My Victorian Story’, ‘a hyper-personal timeline of Victoria that maps key historical moments in the state’s history against a user’s family history’

John Emmerson Research Fellowship ($15,000)

• Gordon Raeburn for ‘Weaponised Emotions and their use in Civil War Tracts and Pamphlets’, ‘an investigation of the presence and use of emotions in the extensive collection of Civil War tracts and pamphlets contained in the Emmerson Collection’

La Trobe Society Fellowship ($15,000)

• Monique Webber for ‘La Trobe’s Garden City and the Lost Sculptures of Fitzroy Gardens’, which ‘explores La Trobe’s vision of formalised civic gardens and the Fitzroy Gardens lost classical sculptures’ and ‘will result in written, oral, and visual outcomes and will include a walking tour of the gardens’

Russell Beedles Performing Arts Fellowship ($15,000)

• Andrew Watt for ‘Melbourne Live Music (1987-97)—From the Pages of InPress Magazine’, which ‘investigates the evolution of the Melbourne live entertainment scene across a decade through the pages of Inpress magazine’ and ‘will result in a publication and podcast series’

Georges Mora Fellowship ($10,000)

• Catherine Evans for ‘The View from Mount Disappointment’, which ‘will result in a large scale installation and an artist book that explore new cross-disciplinary connections between historical documents and how place and history are remembered’

Redmond Barry Fellowship ($20,000)

• Luke Keogh for ‘Garden State: the Wardian case, Victoria and the Global Nursery Trade’, which ‘explores the Wardian case, a portable greenhouse used for moving live plants that revolutionised the movement of live plants around the globe’ and ‘will result in a scholarly article and a chapter in Luke’s forthcoming book’.

The fellowships are awarded annually on the advice of independent expert panels and funded by the State Library Victoria Foundation and other program partners. For more information, click here.

Category: Library news