Fiona Murphy awarded Peter Blazey 2024 Fellowship
The winner of the 2024 Peter Blazey Fellowship is Fiona Murphy who will work on her second book, Livelihood.
Pictured: Fiona Murphy. Source: Ebony Kate Dennis.
The winner of the Peter Blazey Fellowship for 2024 is Fiona Murphy who will work on her second book, Livelihood. This intimate collection of essays shines light on the ingenuity of Deaf people through a series of portraits showcasing their working lives.
The panel recognised Murphy as an enormous literary talent and welcome this important work by an author with lived experience of deafness.
The Blazey Fellowship will support making interviews with the subjects of these essays accessible for both the author and the interview subjects. Murphy is a powerful writer with a unique voice and this book promises to both entertain and enlighten.
In accepting the award, Murphy said, “it is an honour to be awarded the 2024 Peter Blazey Fellowship. The fellowship has recognised writers I deeply admire, whose work has expanded my understanding of the world by speaking truth with rigour and heart.
“I am grateful for the support to write my second book. Deaf people continue to experience stigma, exclusion, financial uncertainty, and ultimately shorter lives. We exist in a hearing world. Bringing together archival research, interviews and memoir, Livelihood will ask the question: What would the world look like if hearing people started to listen to deaf people?”
Founders Tim Herbert and Clive Blazey AM say, “Since 2004, the Peter Blazey Fellowship has helped Australian writers produce some sixteen published books, many of which then garnered significant honours including a National Biography Award and a Prime Minister’s Prize.
“In the Award’s twentieth year, Fiona Murphy wins for her narrative non-fiction essays about deafness. This promises to be a significant work dealing with marginalisation and the personal courage required to compel societal change. As a ‘78er’, caught up in the riot that would become the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, writer and change-maker Peter Blazey would be very pleased.”
Special commendations went to the following outstanding writers:
Sarah Walker
Sarah Walker produced a work of hybrid writing about Australia’s drinking culture and the death by ethanol toxicity of her mother, structured on a framework of folkloric metaphors around water. With powerful observation and striking imagery, Piscine promises to be a lyrical second book of memoir from a significant voice. Combining global flood myths – the Epic of Gilgamesh, Atlantis and the Biblical flood – and their intersections with real, recent events (Hurricane Katrina and its long tail, and the Australian floods), the project explores the idea that water holds deep mythical meaning for humans, “as a representation of the unknown, and of the fear of things going wrong at a grand scale’’.
Eda Gunaydin
Asking ‘how do we go on?’ Eda Gunaydin’s new essay collection, This Is Where I Leave You, is an affecting portrait of a world after 2020. Writing in the face of neoliberal capitalism, of an anesthetic divorce, of looming ecological collapse, of complicated family relationships, Gunaydin skillfully traces the new selves that begin to emerge in the wake of such historical and personal change. In her careful attention to language, Gunaydin opens up new ways to navigate and articulate the incommensurable in the twenty-first century.
Micaela Sahhar
Micaela Sahhar has a vital new voice to offer Australian non-fiction. Her timely and provocative manuscript, provisionally titled Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family, works to provide an account of the Palestinian diaspora in forty-eight parts, foregrounding themes of displacement and contingency via the lived experience of a particular family. The project is part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-testimony, aided by the author’s field notes from a journey to Palestine in mid 2023. Sahhar’s focus on the affective aspects of the Palestinian experience provides unique insight into importance of place and belonging and bears witness to the dignity and determination that comes with survival beyond the catastrophic.
See the full list of citations and list of past winners on the Faculty of Arts website.