Mark's Say: May, 2022
In 2001, to mark International Women’s Day, our events manager Chris Gordon organised a panel at Readings Carlton to discuss why women writers were largely overlooked when the major literary prizes were awarded. ‘We were pissed off,’ Chris says. From that night, the Stella Prize was born, and this year marks the awarding of the 10th Stella Prize. Stella drives significant cultural change by elevating the work ofAustralian women and non-binary writers, and although the prize is the most well-known aspect of that work, it also seeks to influence gender equality in literature through research, advocacy and education. Stella has been supported in its endeavours by individuals and philanthropists. In 2016 it launched the Stella Forever Fund, an initiative to raise $3 million to endow the prize in perpetuity. The fund was helped enormously when Sydney philanthropist Paula McLean donated $1 million last year, and the fund is now around $500,000 shy of achieving its goal. The Stella people would love to reach $3 million on their 11th anniversary. It’s amazing what the Stella Prize has achieved in its short history so go to their website if you’d like to help them reach this milestone.
Alison Croggon is a Melbourne poet and writer who has taken on the task of translating Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Published in 1923, Duino Elegies is one of the most popular works of poetry and has been translated into English many times. Croggon started on the translations 20 years ago. She felt that the translations she had read missed something of ‘the precise, broken beauty and surging rhythms of Rilke’s German, and [she] wanted to understand better what was going on in the poetry.’ Croggon studied German at high school and each year would enter the Goethe Competition to recite different German poems. She ‘loved the sounds of the poems in [her] mouth’. Although she’d loved those translations, she thought they were too beautiful, that they masked the tough directness of Rilke’s German. It’s only in the past few months that she’s been able to complete her translations and publish them with the original German text, and the book is now available in our Carlton shop and online.
The Readings Foundation has been a proud supporter of Banksia Gardens’ Aiming High VCE Support Program since 2017. The program provides support for aspirational young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Broadmeadows and Craigieburn regions. They recently shared the story of one of their alumni, Bashir, who arrived from Kenya in 2017 (he is originally from Somalia). Two years after arriving in Broadmeadows, he entered the Aiming High program as a Year 11 and then a Year 12 student.Going online in his final year of school during Covid was tough for Bashir, especially seeing as he’d only arrived in the country two years earlier. His work as a school captain and his competitive running were put on hold. These responsibilities normally kept him motivated, and he missed the social interaction he normally had at school.
But despite Covid and despite lockdowns, with the support of Banksia Gardens’ Aiming High program, he achieved an ATAR result of 96.8 and became the dux of his school. Bashir is now studying a Bachelor of Biomedical Science at Monash University with the goal of becoming a surgeon in the future. He is also finding time in his busy schedule to work with students at his former school as a tutor.
