Founding
In October 1962 the President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, [1] Walter Stone, invited delegates from all other writers' societies to a meeting in Sydney to discuss the formation of a national organisation to represent professional authors. A series of meetings followed culminating in the formation of the ASA on 15 May 1963, and the acceptance of a provisional constitution on 26 June 1963. [2]
Miles Franklin Award winning author Dal Stivens became the founding President of the ASA in 1963. [3] [4]
The poet Jill Hellyer was the first Executive Secretary and received an honorarium of £10 a week. Her home in Mt Colah became the ASA's first official address. Vice presidents were the novelist Morris West and the critic and sometime publisher P.R. ("Inky") Stephensen. The treasurer was bookseller A.W. Sheppard, and printer Walter Stone was the editor of the new society's journal Broadside (which would later become [5] Australian Author). Other authors on the first committee and council included Nancy Cato, Nan Chauncy, C.B. Christesen, Joan Clarke, Dymphna Cusack, Frank Dalby Davison, Mary Durack Miller, John K. Ewers, Sir Keith Hancock, Xavier Herbert, A. D. Hope, Leonard Mann, Alan Marshall, David Martin, T. Inglis Moore, John O'Grady, Roland Robinson, Colin Simpson, Douglas Stewart, Judith Wright, Betty Roland, and Alan Yates.
Awards
The ASA Medal is awarded to an Australian author or illustrator "who has made an outstanding contribution to Australian culture as both a creator and an advocate". The inaugural medal went to Anita Heiss in 2002; other recipients include Thomas Keneally (2019), Edel Wignell (2017), Valerie Parv (2014), Nadia Wheatley (2014), Robert Pullan (2012), Hazel Edwards (2009), Glenda Adams (2007), Inga Clendinnen (2005), and Tim Winton (2003). [7]
The ASA administers the Barbara Jefferis Award, [8] which is funded from a bequest from the late John Hinde in tribute to his wife, who was a founding member of the Society. The award was first presented in 2008 (to Rhyll McMaster for her book Feather Man (2007). [9]
It also administers the annual Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship, worth $20,000; the Varuna Ray Koppe Young Writers Residency; [8] and, since 2020, the ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize. [10]
Authors' bequests
The Society received a bequest of the copyright of author Mouni Sadhu (Mieczyslaw Sudowski) in 1972 and currently administers the rights for the works of this author. [11] In 2008, the ASA was bequeathed the literary estate of founder Dal Stivens by his heir Juanita Cragen. [12] In July 2013, Edel Wignell bequeathed her writing earnings and copyright to the ASA. [13]
In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work, whether that work is in written, graphic, or recorded medium. The creation of such a work is an act of authorship. Thus, a sculptor, painter, or composer, is an author of their respective sculptures, paintings, or compositions, even though in common parlance, an author is often thought of as the writer of a book, article, play, or other written work. In the case of a work for hire, the employer or commissioning party is considered the author of the work, even if they did not write or otherwise create the work, but merely instructed another individual to do so.
A public lending right (PLR) is a program intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries or as a governmental support of the arts, through support of works available in public libraries, such as books, music and artwork.
The Canada Council for the Arts, commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It is Canada's public arts funder, with a mandate to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.
A performance rights organisation (PRO), also known as a performing rights society, provides intermediary functions, particularly collection of royalties, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly in locations such as shopping and dining venues. Legal consumer purchase of works, such as buying CDs from a music store, confer private performance rights. PROs usually only collect royalties when use of a work is incidental to an organisation's purpose. Royalties for works essential to an organisation's purpose, such as theaters and radio, are usually negotiated directly with the rights holder. The interest of the organisations varies: many have the sole focus of musical works, while others may also encompass works and authors for audiovisual, drama, literature, or the visual arts.
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), established in 1959, is a trade union for professional writers. It is affiliated with both the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds (IAWG).
APRA AMCOS consists of Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS), both copyright management organisations or copyright collectives which jointly represent over 100,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in Australia and New Zealand. The two organisations work together to license public performances and administer performance, communication and reproduction rights on behalf of their members, who are creators of musical works, aiming to ensure fair payments to members and to defend their rights under the Australian Copyright Act (1968).
The Australian Writers' Guild (AWG) is the professional association for Australian performance writers for film, television, radio, theatre, video, and new media. The AWG was established in 1962, and has conferred the AWGIE Awards since 1968, the Monte Miller Awards since 1972, and the John Hinde Award since 2008.
A publishing contract is a legal contract between a publisher and a writer or author, to publish original content by the writer(s) or author(s). This may involve a single written work, or a series of works.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a British organisation that works to ensure that writers are fairly compensated for any of their works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. It has operated in the United Kingdom since 1977. From that year to 2016, the ALCS distributed over £450 million to authors, and at the end of 2016 had in excess of 90,000 members.
Dallas George "Dal" Stivens was an Australian writer who produced six novels and eight collections of short stories between 1936, when The Tramp and Other Stories was published, and 1976, when his last collection The Unicorn and Other Tales was released.
Droit de suite (French for "right to follow") or Artist's Resale Right (ARR) is a right granted to artists or their heirs, in some jurisdictions, to receive a fee on the resale of their works of art. This should be contrasted with policies such as the American first-sale doctrine, where artists do not have the right to control or profit from subsequent sales.
Directive 92/100/EEC is a European Union directive in the field of copyright law, made under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It creates a "rental and lending right" as a part of copyright protection, and sets out minimum standards of protection for the related rights of performers, phonogram and film producers and broadcasting organizations.
Barbara Jefferis AM was an Australian author.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is an Australian literary award prize. The award was created in 2007 after being endowed by John Hinde upon his death to commemorate his late wife, author Barbara Jefferis. It is funded by his $1 million bequest. Originally an annual award, it has been awarded biennially since 2012.
The Irish Writers Union (Irish: Aontas Scríbhneoirí Éireann), also known by its acronym, IWU, is a representative association devoted to furthering the professional interests and needs of writers in various media in Ireland. The Union is based in the building of the Irish Writers Centre, in the centre of Dublin. The IWU is a member of the European Writers' Council (EWC), which itself is the largest federation worldwide that solely represents writers. The Irish Writers Union became an affiliate of the trade union SIPTU in 1993, but retained complete autonomy in the running of its own affairs. It is the only nominating body in Ireland for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The IWU is also a nominating body for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The Irish Copyright Licensing Agency (ILCA) also works with the IWU.
The Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers in Israel, known by the acronym ACUM, is a non-profit copyright collective which engages in collective rights management for authors, poets, lyricists, composers, arrangers, and music publishers in Israel. As a member of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), ACUM is affiliated with more than 100 similar rights organizations around the world, with which it engages in reciprocal royalty collection agreements. It also holds an annual prize ceremony which honors authors and musicians in many categories, including lifetime achievement.
The Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) is a South Korean non-profit copyright collective for musical works, administering public performance and broadcasting rights, and mechanical recording and reproduction rights. Founded in 1964, it is the second collective rights management organization for musical works in Asia, after JASRAC in Japan. It is also one of the largest in Asia, with over 40,000 members. In 2021, it collected ₩289 billion in licensing fees and distributed ₩256 billion in royalties to its members.
Edwin Colin Simpson, known professionally by his pen name Colin Simpson, was an Australian journalist, author and traveller. After a successful career as a journalist with Sydney newspapers and a writer of radio documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he became a freelance writer of "popular travel books" which sold more than half a million copies. He was "instrumental in securing the Public Lending Right legislation" for Australian authors.
