Aviva Tuffield, you’re my hero

Annie Proulx was 58 when her debut novel was published. Image: Flickr/embajadaeeuubuenosaires

There’s a common category of many government-funded arts programs in Australia: “young and emerging.” This is for programs aimed at artists of a fairly arbitrary age range, typically 18 to 25 years, sometimes up to 30. It’s prevalent throughout all tiers of government and whole systems of funding, arts infrastructure and public programs have sprung up to support the “young and emerging” as though nurturing these artists will naturally lead to “middle aged and established.”

The idea is that young artists are typically emerging artists. I have no argument with that. Though there are many authors I could name who established professional careers in their late teens or early twenties, the majority of writers under 25 are still in the early years of their craft. Nobody could deny that young artists face hurdles that older artists do not. They are yet to establish a regular income stream, either from their artwork or secondary sources. They may lack control over their living arrangements and are yet to complete their education. They are still developing confidence and professional networks.

The problem lies in linking the term “young” with “emerging” as though the two always go together.

The truth is most emerging writers are not young. Writers can emerge at any age, and frequently do so in their later years when income stablises, when children are grown and independent, when decades of living smooth down the geological layers of observation and experience that all writers mine for their stories. But in Australia, the landscape of funding and support for emerging artists between, say, 35 and 65, is a wasteland. There are now more opportunities, funding streams, and publishing markets for young Australian writers than nearly any other group.

As the director of a writers organisation this has always been a source of immense frustration for me. The majority of my members are between 30 and 50 years of age, and there are some very fine writers among them. But they are excluded from some of the most innovative programs in Australia because they are not in a priority demographic.

Enter Scribe Publications and fiction editor Aviva Tuffield, who has just announced the launch of the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript by an Australian over the age of 35. Scribe’s media release accompanying the announcement says:

While athletes, for example, peak in their youth, writers can develop at any stage of life and often come of age later and write their best work after a few attempts. This year’s Orange Prize for New Writers in the UK had a shortlist of three debut women authors, none of whom was under forty.

This is brilliant, rational and long overdue. Aviva Tuffield and publisher Henry Rosenbloom deserve every gushing email of thanks from over-35 writers that will be flooding their inboxes in the coming weeks. Hats off to you, Scribe, I can’t wait to read the first book published under this new award.