The Peter Blazey Fellowship
The Peter Blazey Fellowship was established to honour the memory of Peter Blazey - journalist, author and gay activist - and has been made available through the generosity of Clive Blazey and Tim Herbert, brother and partner of Peter Blazey.
Blazey was born in Melbourne in 1939 and worked for the Australian, the National Times and as a regular columnist for OutRage magazine. He published a number of books, including a political biography of Henry Bolte, and was co-editor of the short fiction anthology, Love Cries. His personal memoir, ScrewLoose, appeared after his death from AIDS in 1997.
"Peter was someone with a lion's head of loose ends that could never fit into some ideologically sound and tidy space. Storyteller, mythomane, and one of the last great conversationalists in a country wary of the free flow of uncensored language, he was a comet who flashed his tail at everyone."
- Tim Herbert, OutRage, 1997
The Peter Blazey Fellowship was launched by the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby in May 2004.
The Fellowship is awarded annually to writers in the non-fiction fields of biography, autobiography and life writing and is intended to further a work in progress. Applications will be judged on literary merit, and the winner will be supported in his or her work by a cash prize of $15 000, and a one-month writer-in-residency at the Australian Centre.
2010 Peter Blazey Fellowship
Lily Chan, for her memoir of her grandmother. The judges commented of Chan’s work:
Beautifully written, evocative and memorable, this piecce of writing by a young writer with a fresh voice that holds out the promise of a career in which great things may be achieved.
Lily Chan is a Western Australian writer and lawyer.
Download the judges report (PDF 260KB)
Past winners
2009: Maggie Mackellar, for her work in progress, Anatomy of a Grief. Dr Maggie Mackellar is a writer and historian, who has previously published Core of my heart, my country, (MUP, 2004). Download the judges' report (pdf 180kb)
2008: Prize shared between Andrew Lindsay, for his work in progress The God of Morphine, and Dmetri Kakmi, for his work in progress, Motherland. Download the judges' report (pdf 139kb).
2007: Judith Pugh, for her work-in-progress, In My Seventies. Her account of living with the painter Clifton Pugh, and of the art scene in which they moved during the 1970s encompasses the larger cultural politics of the period, interwoven with an intimate and nuanced analysis of the troubles Pugh carried with him from his experiences in the Second World War. With remarkable psychological depth and control of tone, Judith Pugh’s eloquent yet sparse prose provides an arresting portrait of a public figure and a compelling private story.
2006: Robert Kenny, ‘The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World’ (to be published by Scribe Publications).
2005: Jennifer Compton, for her work titled "Who Doesn't Want Me to Dance".
2004: Sara Hardy for her biography of Australian landscape designer, Edna Walling. "The Unusual Life of Edna Walling" was published in April 2005 by Allen and Unwin.