Dr Jacqueline Leckie (pictured) has been awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship 2024 to work on her novel with the working title Meg Campbell (1937–2007): Aroha and Resistance.

This fellowship is awarded annually and is made possible by the generosity of the Beatsons. It gives New Zealand authors an opportunity to be economically secure while bringing a project to completion.

The judging panel of Paddy Richardson and Laurence Fearnley said: "the winning project by Dr Jacqueline Leckie is one of national significance as it is the first biography of poet Meg Campbell, and will add to the history of NZ women's literature in an original and engaging manner."

Writers with projects shortlisted for the fellowship in 2024 were Alison Ballance, Chris Bourke, Majella Cullinane, Lee Murray, Vivienne Plumb, and Kerrin Sharpe.

The Judges said that each of the projects of the shortlisted writers were of high literary merit and would be of national significance when completed. They found all thirty of the applications made in 2024 to be of a very high standard, featuring exciting and promising projects, and proposing a wide variety of subjects relating to topics such as social history, place and belonging and concern with the environment. Genres ranged across novels, short story and poetry collections, non-fiction, memoirs and biography.

Dr Jacqueline Leckie says she is honoured to be the recipient of the 2024 Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship. Poet Meg Campbell's story has never before been told in a full length biography and the poet is often shadowed by the creative renown of her husband, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell.

Jacqueline Leckie is a non-fiction writer and researcher based in Ōtepoti. She is an adjunct research fellow with the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington (and a former J. D. Stout Research Fellow there), and a conjoint associate professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Jacqui lectured for several decades in anthropology and history at Otago University, the University of the South Pacific and Kenyatta University. She is a co-editor of the Journal of Pacific History. Jacqui has published extensively, especially on the Pacific, the Indian diaspora and mental health history. Her most recent book is Old Black Cloud. A Cultural History of Mental Depression in Aotearoa. Other books include Invisible. New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians; A University for the South Pacific; Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji; Indian Settlers. The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community; and To Labour with the State.

In 2023 the fellowship was awarded to Laurence Fearnley to work on a novel based on the sense of sight, the fourth of a series of novels based around the five senses.

In previous years, recipients have included: Whiti Hereaka, Siobhan Harvey, Frankie McMillan, Sue Wooton, Paddy Richardson, Tina Makereti, Tim Jones, Emma Neale, Mandy Hager, Carl Nixon, Glenn Colquhoun, Sue McCauley and Marilyn Duckworth.

The NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship is an annual award open to any NZSA member working on a new fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama project.

More details about the fellowship are available here.