Journalist Fellowships
Update
Author and freelance journalist, Fran Abrams, has been awarded the 2007 Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) Journalist Fellowship to explore how and why so many young people in Britain fall outside of our education, employment and training systems.
Background
Over the last eight years, the JRF has been making awards – two every two years – to enable established journalists to take time out from their pressurised, deadline-driven lives to write a book on a subject of importance to the JRF.
The following books have been published so far:
- Richard Tomlinson's Late Shift: The Death of Retirement (2007, Methuen)
- Madeleine Bunting's Willing slaves: How the overwork culture is ruining our lives (2004, Harper Collins)
- Polly Ghazi's The 24-hour family: A parent's guide to work-life balance (2003, The Women's Press Ltd)
- Jeremy Laurance's Pure madness: How fear drives the mental health system (2003, Routledge)
- Nicholas Schoon's The Chosen City (2001, Spon Press)
- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Mixed feelings: The complex lives of mixed-race Britons (2001, Women's Press)
- Christian Wolmar's Forgotten children: The secret abuse of children's homes (2000, Vision)
These Fellowships achieve a variety of outcomes:
- a well-written book adding to the understanding of a significant issue;
- a contribution to policy making in an area of direct interest to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation;
- an opportunity for dissemination of findings from the Foundation's R&D, with a chance for highly skilled writers to re-present research in an accessible and stimulating format (with commentary and context that provides analysis beyond the academic's reach).
Judges for the Awards have included, alongside JRF Trustees, Nick Timmins from the Financial Times (who was funded by the Foundation to write his Five Giants history of the welfare state) and Professor Peter Hennessy (who was similarly supported by the Foundation to produce his famous Whitehall).