Kate Challis RAKA Award

Eligibility

To be eligible for this scholarship, you need to:

• be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander screenwriter
• have had your screenplay produced between January 2014 and January 2019

The recipient is required to:

• Accept award online within 14 days
• Attend the award announcement

Submit your application online and upload the following documents to support your application:

1. Curriculum vitae
2. The script
3. Link and password (if required) to the produced work, or supply as digital file
4. Three high resolution film stills

The shortlist will be announced in early August 2019.

The winner will be announced at the Australian Centre and Faculty of Arts Literary Awards event at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday 7 September 2019.

The prize is awarded in a five-year cycle with a different area of the arts – creative prose, drama, the visual arts, script-writing and poetry – being rewarded each year. Area of creative arts for 2019 is: the best script for film or television screened in the preceding five years.

Professor Emeritius Bernard Smith

This award for Indigenous creative artists has been made available through the generosity of Professor Emeritus Bernard Smith, eminent art and cultural historian. The prize was established to honour the memory of his late wife, Kate Challis, who was known in her youth as Ruth Adeney (RAKA is an acronym for the Ruth Adeney Koori Award).

In the Pintupi language, 'raka' means 'five' and in the Warlpiri 'rdaka' means 'hand', and both meanings are particularly apt for a prize to be awarded in a cycle of five years to individual artists – novelists, poets, script writers, visual artists and playwrights – whose 'hands' are the basic means of creativity.