When did you start reading ABR?

Several lifetimes ago. In the government offices where I worked, ABR lay around with the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. I assumed, because ABR offered a similar quality of reading experience, that the magazine enjoyed the same level of financial resources!

Why does cultural philanthropy matter to you? A life without books, music and the opportunity to visit galleries, great houses and gardens would be colourless. Insupportable. Similarly, the freedom to express one’s view about those experiences is, to me, an inalienable right. Yet in the past I have given little thought to the day-to-day lives of arts practitioners. Cultural philanthropy ensures the survival of those pleasures that it is so easy to take for granted. The smallest donation is an investment in our future as Australians, our society.

Why ABR in particular?

As the first recipient of ABR’s major prize, it is time for me to give back. Fortunately, this desire to ‘give back’ has coincided with an inheritance. Last year I was an anonymous patron. This year I am ‘out’.

What do you enjoy most about the magazine?

I read the magazine as follows: first the stoushes in the Letters pages, then Advances, poems and essays. Lastly, I pick and peck around the reviews. I always read the ‘stud book’ at the back with close attention.

Elisabeth Holdsworth was born in the Netherlands and moved to Australia in the late 1950s. For many years she worked for the Department of Defence. She is well known to ABR readers as the author of the remarkable essay ‘An Die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, which won the inaugural Calibre Prize in 2007. Currently she is writing a novel called New Holland.