2025 | Michelle Staff
Michelle Staff (ACT) was announced as the winner of the 2025 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship at Adelaide Writers’ Week on 5 March 2025. The announcement followed a discussion between Geordie Williamson and Matthew Lamb, our 2016 Fellow, about his biography Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths.
Michelle is writing a joint biography of influential feminist activists and sisters Bessie Rischbieth and Olive Evans (née Earle). Born in late 19th century South Australia, both sisters married and moved to Western Australia around the turn of the century. Although they led different lives, with Bessie becoming a childless but wealthy widow who travelled the world to promote women’s rights and Olive a mother of six who stayed in Perth working for similar causes, they shared similar interests and values. Bessie established an Australia-wide feminist organisation, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, and Olive was especially active in the Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia. With a strong personal relationship that extended into their activist work, both played significant if differently recognised roles in Australian feminist history.
Michelle is a feminist historian based in Kamberri/Canberra. After studying at the Universities of Sydney and Oxford, she completed her PhD at The Australian National University in 2023. She is the Online and Outreach Manager for the National Centre of Biography at the ANU.
2025 | Highly Commended Monique Rooney
This year the judges decided to give a Highly Commended award to Monique Rooney, who is writing a biography of acclaimed New Zealand-born Australian writer Ruth Park.
Monique Rooney 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.
2025 | Highly Commended Jennifer Martin
This year the judges decided to give a Highly Commended award to Jennifer Martin, who is writing a biography of Eva Sommer, who, in 1956 at the age of 22, won Australia’s first international prize for journalism, the Walkley Award, the nation’s equivalent of the US Pulitzer Prize.
Jennifer Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Deakin University, where her research interests include literary journalism and Australian media history. Jennifer is a former award-winning journalist of more than 30 years’ experience working across all media platforms, including Leader suburban newspapers, SBS, ABC and community radio. She is also the author of two young adult novels.
