2026 | Jennifer Martin
Jennifer Martin (Vic) was announced as the winner of the 2026 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship at State Library Victoria on 11 March following a discussion between Tim Byrne and Lance Richardson, our 2020 Fellow, about his biography True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen (Chatto & Windus, 2025).
Jennifer is writing a biography of Eva Sommer, who, in 1956 at the age of 22, beat a field of experienced men to win Australia’s first national prize for journalism, a Walkley Award. When Eva died in 2019 aged 84, this principled, courageous and complex daughter of Jewish immigrants who fought to live and love on her terms had been forgotten: this biography will tell that story.
Jennifer Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Deakin University, where her research interests include literary journalism and Australian media history. Jennifer won the United Nations of Australia Media Peace Prize for her reporting and has 30 years’ experience as a journalist. She is also the author of two young adult novels.
2026 | Highly Commended Monique Rooney
This year the judges decided to give a Highly Commended award of $10,000 to Monique Rooney, who is writing a biography of acclaimed New Zealand-born Australian writer Ruth Park. ‘Ruth Park: A biography’ will be the first book-length biography of one of Australasia’s major writers, revealing how ‘the calling to write’ was, for Park, ‘not a means of livelihood but life itself’. Drawing on exclusive access to the Park–Niland archive at the State Library of New South Wales, the biography will illuminate the imaginative drive behind her fiction and non-fiction for adults and children, and the creative vision that sustained her trans-Tasman literary life.
Monique teaches and researches in the English literature program at the Australian National University, with a focus on Australian and US literature. She is the Director of the Centre for Australian Literary Cultures and Editor of Australian Humanities Review. In 2023, as the Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, she began research into Ruth Park’s extensive archives in preparation for writing a literary biography of the celebrated Australian author.
2026 | Highly Commended Theodore Ell
This year the judges decided to give a Highly Commended award of $10,000 to Theodore Ell, who is writing a biography of Australian poet Les Murray, ‘This Country is My Mind: The Life of Les Murray’. A new authorised biography of the poet, this book will draw on archival discoveries, interviews and fresh historical insights, to explore the literary sources of Murray’s work and the Australia of his imagination, and the ways in which he defined himself through his relationships to other writers.
Theodore is a writer who currently lives in Canberra. His essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, about witnessing the Lebanese revolution and surviving the Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. His memoir of that period, Lebanon Days, was published in August 2024 and was Highly Commended for the 2025 ACT Book of the Year. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the 2022 Anne Elder Award. His non-fiction and poetry have been published internationally and to acclaim in the Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Conversation. In 2026 he is a Visiting Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, in support of his biography of poet Les Murray, ‘This Country Is My Mind’.
2026 | Highly Commended Ashleigh Wilson
This year the judges decided to give a Highly Commended award of $10,000 to Ashleigh Wilson, who is writing a biography of Barry Humphries. Ashleigh’s book on the life and times of Barry Humphries will be a kaleidoscopic account of a richly complex creative force. This is the story of a transformative talent: the erudite collector, the comic genius, the Dada enthusiast, the painter, the curious student of the music hall who spent decades observing the currents of the world around him.
Ashleigh, who is a Walkley-award-winning journalist, is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (2016), On Artists (2019) and A Year with Wendy Whiteley (2022), and the editor of Transcendence: 50 Years of Unforgettable Moments at the Sydney Opera House (1973). He works at the Sydney Opera House.
(Photo: Mclean Stephenson)
