Andrew Denton's $25,000 for Australian writers

It's great to hear that media personality Andrew Denton is announcing a new $25,000 scholarship named in honour of his late father. Andrew will be announcing this at the 39th annual AWGIE Awards tomorrow night (Friday, August 25).

Here's some information from the organisers:

The inaugural Kit Denton Scholarship will be open to all Australian Writers’ Guild members and will be awarded at the AWGIE Awards in 2007.

An initiative of the Australian Writers’ Foundation, the professional development arm of the AWG, the scholarship will be judged by an industry panel, including Andrew Denton. The annual scholarship will offer financial, legal and logistical support as well as artistic representation for 12 months.

A lifetime member of the Australian Writers Guild, Kit Denton died in 1997 having written novels, short stories radio and television documentaries, verse, lyrics and feature film scripts. He was also a script assessor for the Australian Film Development Corporation and script consultant for Film Australia.

When approached by Foundation President, Geoffrey Atherden, about the scholarship, Andrew Denton suggested the criteria be simple: the writer’s work must demonstrate courage.

“Kit was a writer’s writer, always drinking in the work of others,” Mr Denton said. “He constantly made himself available to those who sought guidance. He was unfailingly professional, a man of commitment and integrity and never afraid to speak the truth as he saw it.”

Perhaps this is best illustrated by the sequel to his most famous work, The Breaker, a novel about the trial and execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock by the British military tribunal during the Boer War. An international best seller, most authors would have let things be, but not Kit. A decade later, he published the sequel, Closed File, a non-fiction work to tell the truth on information he received in the intervening years.

“The fact that Closed File was, in some ways, an admission by Kit that his original work was “top dressed with dramatic license”, his words, did not bother him,” Mr Denton added. “Kit was interested in the truth even if it was at his own expense.”

The aim of the scholarship is to support writers in a material and practical way so that they may be heard in full voice. The winner will be expected to produce a script or other form of a developed project by the end of the 12 months.