Sasha Gattermayr, a graduate from the University of Melbourne’s Master of Journalism program, has won top honours as Student Journalist of the Year at the Melbourne Press Club’s 2023 Quill Awards.
Sasha said that the “award could have gone to any of my peers and students from other universities so its humbling to be recognised by the Press Club, who do a fantastic job valuing student journalism”.
“A huge thanks goes to the inspiring tutors I had over my Masters, and to the peers I collaborated with on stories throughout the year.”
Sasha, whose work has appeared in The Citizen, The Age, The New York Times and The Design Files, was nominated for her narrative non-fiction story, ‘Little club of horrors’, which tells the story of the Victorian Carnivorous Plant Society and was published in The Monthly and as a podcast for the Weekend Read.
“Some of the best, most interesting and diverse journalism in the country is coming out of uni students and publications, and I’m so excited to be a part of that,” Sasha said.
This isn’t the first journalism honour Sasha has collected. She was one of four members of an investigative reporting team awarded the Democracy’s Watchdogs 2022 prize for a story investigating air pollution in Melbourne’s west, and which was co-published by The Age.
Now based in Vienna, Sasha continues to produce Tart magazine, a bi-annual print magazine about “everything that comes to mind we are gathered around food” which she co-founded, and is working as a freelance journalist and writer.
Sasha is the fourth University of Melbourne journalism graduate to win the coveted Quills Student Journalist of the Year award in the past five years. Previous winners were Petra Stock (2021), Jess Malcolm (2020) and Liam Petterson (2019).
