The Hazel Rowley Fellowship has just announced its 2026 Highly Commended awards, recognising two outstanding biography projects in progress: Monique Rooney, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, who is writing the life of Ruth Park, and Honorary Lecturer Theodore Ell who writing about poet Les Murray.  

Now in its 14th year, the Hazel Rowley Fellowship was created to honour her as a skilled and passionate biographer, and to encourage others to write with the same care and enthusiasm in a genre that demands an exceptional commitment of time and energy.  Drawing on Hazel's own experience, the Fellowship's founders recognised that a work in progress — particularly one requiring international research travel and sustained archival work — needs real financial support to reach completion.

Each award carries a generous prize, funding enough to support international research travel, a cornerstone of the kind of deeply sourced, richly detailed biographical writing the Fellowship was created to champion.

Monique is writing a biography of acclaimed New Zealand-born Australian writer Ruth Park. ‘Ruth Park: A biography’, 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.

Theodore is writing an authorised biography of Australian poet Les Murray, ‘This Country is My Mind: The Life of Les Murray’. 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.

We congratulate both on their richly-deserved awards.