Caroline Baum wins the 2015 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum has just been announced as the winner of the 2015 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship at the Adelaide Writers Festival tonight, the announcement followed the Hazel Rowley Memorial Lecture, given by David Marr.

“Caroline Baum’s proposed biography of Lucie Dreyfus is ambitious in scope, international in reach and blazingly original,” said Janine Burke, one of the judges of the Fellowship. “This is an untold tale. And what a tale!”

Baum will use the $10,000 Fellowship to write a biography of Lucie Dreyfus (1870-1945).

Lucie Dreyfus was married to Alfred Drefyus, the French artillery officer who was at the centre of one of the most divisive political scandals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Baum’s words, her project “seeks to restore Lucie Dreyfus to her rightful place in history”. As part of her research, Baum will translate into English the letters between Lucie and Alfred when he was imprisoned on Devil’s Island. These letters, written in French, have not previously been translated. Baum’s biography will focus on aspects of anti-semitism as well as Lucie Dreyfus’s experiences as a Jewish woman living in occupied Paris during the Second World War.

Now in its fourth year, the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship was established to encourage Australian authors to attain a high standard of biography writing and to commemorate the life, ideas and writing of Hazel Rowley. Having published four major books, Rowley established herself as one of the world’s leading literary biographers before dying suddenly in 2011.

Last year’s winner of the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship was Maxine Beneba Clarke for The Hate Race, her forthcoming memoir about growing up black in white, middle-class Australia. Stephany Steggall was the 2013 winner for her biography of Thomas Keneally and the inaugural 2012 winner was Mary Hoban for her biography of Julia Sorell.

Check out Caroline’s Books of the Month in The Booktopia Buzz

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About the Contributor

Andrew Cattanach

Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.

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