Australian Women’s Weekly editor Helen McCabe will chair the new Positive Body Image Awards Panel. Body image is seen as a significant issue for young people and pressures to conform to unrealistic ideals can have serious impacts on individuals. The awards are one initiative to encourage more positive body image messages in industries often criticised for their limited portrayal of body norms…
Literature professor, novelist and breast cancer survivor Brenda Walker won this year’s Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers for Reading by Moonlight – a memoir of her illness. It is her second Kibble win and comes a year after her mother, Shirley Walker, won the award for her own memoir The Ghost at the Wedding. Kristel Thornell’s historic fiction Night Street won the Dobbie Literary Award for a first-published female writer…
Professor Fiona Stanley and Jane Bennett are new non-executive directors on the ABC board and Jacqueline Hey and Daryl Karp have begun similar roles at SBS. The women earned all four of the merit-based five-year appointments made this week. Current SBS board member Patricia Azarias was reappointed…
Young SBS reporter Yaara Bou Melhem is the 2011 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year for her solo Dateline reports Freedom’s Call about Syria’s social uprising. Sunday Telegraph journalist Rosie Squires was the Print News category winner for her undercover investigation of Sydney nursing home practices (Our Shame)…
For the first time in its 160 year history, The New York Times has appointed a female Executive Editor. Jill Abramson will take over from incumbent Bill Keller in September. She has been at The TImes since 1997 and has been in its senior ranks since becoming managing editor in 2003 – the first woman to hold that post too…
Australian women making music news … new album releases from Seeker Lover Keeper, Holly Throsby, Grace Woodroofe, Adalita and Jane Walker – plus female songwriters make their presence felt at the APRA music awards…
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor has always been keen to take art to the masses. From driving a converted exhibition bus to Scottish villages, to pioneering free entry to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, her focus has been to make art more accessible. The Australia Council has recognised her outstanding contribution with this year’s $10,000 Visual Arts Medal…
Women featured in eight of the 13 category wins in this year’s NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. They include Margaret Simons who co-authored former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs, three-time poetry winner Jennifer Maiden, and Debra Oswald the scriptwriter for television series Offspring…
Music producer Belinda Webster has received the $60,000 Australia Council Don Banks Music Award for her decades-long contribution to music, particularly classical music of Australian artists…
Sleeping Beauty, the debut film of Sydney-based author Julia Leigh, has been selected as one of 19 movies to vie for the prestigious Palm d’Or prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May…