Fullagar wins 2024 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship
Social and cultural historian Kate Fullagar is the winner of the 2024 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, worth $20,000.
Fullagar was awarded the fellowship for her proposed biography, ‘The Secret Life of Marguerite Wolters’, about an 18th-century spy mistress whose espionage work seems to have contributed significantly to the British decision in 1786 to establish a penal colony in New South Wales.
‘The proposal intrigued the judges, as Kate herself had been intrigued when she first came across Marguerite Wolters while researching her biography Bennelong & Phillip,’ said Della Rowley, sister of the late biographer Hazel Rowley, for whom the prize is named. ‘Kate wanted to know more about this mysterious and unusual Dutch woman who was so influential in British political history.’
Fellowship judge Clare Wright said Fullagar’s research promised ‘a potentially paradigm-shifting understanding of Australian history, with the startling revelation that a woman was one of the chief architects of British colonial expansionism’.
Fullagar’s proposal was selected as the winner from a shortlist of nine that judge Christos Tsiolkas was ‘a testament to the vitality and curiosity in contemporary writing of history and biography’.
Now in its 13th year, the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship was established to commemorate the life and writing of Hazel Rowley. This year’s fellowship was judged by Wright, Tsiolkas, Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan.
The 2023 fellowship recipient was writer and anthropologist Diane Bell, for her proposed biography of the relationship between Ngarrindjeri woman Louisa Karpany, née Kontinyeri (c1840–1921) and George Mason (1811–1876), sub-Protector of Aborigines at Wellington, South Australia. Nine recipients of the fellowship have had their books published to date.
This year’s recipient was announced in an event at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on 13 March, following the Hazel Rowley Memorial Lecture, which featured 2021 recipient Mandy Sayer in conversation with Adolfo Aranjuez about Sayer’s biography, Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters: Australia’s first female filmmaking team (NewSouth, 2022).
More information about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship can be found on the website.
Category: Awards Local news
