Announcing the recipient of our 2024 Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship
Jenny Ruge
We take the pleasure in announcing the recipient selected to undertake the May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship in 2024. This wonderful opportunity not only offers ‘the gift of time’ through being able to take time away from home in accommodation provided by the Trust, but also includes a co-constructed schedule of supported networking opportunities, visits, and professional development.
We extend our warmest congratulations to Jenny Ruge. Originally from a small NSW country town, Jenny spent all of her working life in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, where she had a long career in education. She is a former teacher, researcher, academic and primary school principal, and retired to Queensland nine years ago. She now lives in sunny Redcliffe with her husband, and travels regularly to Melbourne to visit her daughters and grandsons.
In 2018, Jenny took up writing for children for the first time and has subsequently completed several creative writing courses. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Emerging Writer Award for her contemporary YA unpublished manuscript Without A Word. Her short story A Cautionary Tale, was published in the Queensland Writers Centre Right Left Write Anthology (2019-2020). Since that time, she has completed her second manuscript, an historical time-slip novel for middle grade readers. Jenny is currently working on revising both of her novel manuscripts with a view to submitting to publishers in the near future. Her project for the 2024 Ian Wilson Memorial Fellowship is a new historical time-slip novel set in South Australia, working title Unsinkable!.
Jenny is a member of the Queensland Writers Centre, SCBWI, Book Links Qld Inc., and Write Links: Queensland’s Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group. When she’s not writing, Jenny loves reading, researching family history, and going down the rabbit-hole of historical research.