Janet Rickwood Award, 2025
The Janet Rickwood Writing Encouragement Award honours Janet Rickwood (1936-2025), an English teacher and educational leader who touched the lives of many ACT students and teachers.
2025 Janet Rickwood Award Winner
Anamnesis: The Crane That Waited
by Chiara Biggs
Canberra Institute of Technology
This is a sophisticated piece of writing with echoes of magic realism, particularly in its reference to the devastation caused by war. The symbolism of the cranes and the fox is effective and provides interesting layers to the composition.
The writing has a poetic delicacy despite the ugliness of destruction and the sadness of abandoned children. The writer shows great potential in their economical use of language and vivid imagery, making them a worthy winner of the inaugural Janet Rickwood Writing Encouragement Award.
Remembering Janet
As a teacher committed to excellence in the teaching of English, Janet was active in the leadership of ACTATE from when it was founded in 1974. She served in many roles, including as president, and was ACTATE’s first life member. She also served as the public officer for ACTATE and for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) for over 40 years.
Janet is remembered as an expert English teacher and workshop presenter at local and national conferences, as the English consultant, establishing the Canberra Literacy Program in the 1980s, as a principal, and as a mentor of teacher education students at the University of Canberra. Teachers still refer to her 1989 AATE publication, When It’s Fun You Learn.
Janet was an avid reader and she enjoyed reading student writing as a LitLinks judge until 2024. Her legacy lives on in the classrooms, communities and hearts of the students and teachers she inspired.