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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2024

winner y separately published work icon The Moon the Bone : Selected Poems 1986-2022 Tim Metcalf , Port Adelaide : Ginninderra Press , 2023 26939234 2023 selected work poetry 'Working in the Australian bush for almost forty years has brought forth from Tim Metcalf a robust, adaptable and independent poetry, the downside being that he is less known in the urban centres. This selection from his nine books aims to redress the situation and bring this wide-ranging and extensively published poet to broader attention.' (Publication summary) 

Year: 2023

winner (Traditional publishing) y separately published work icon Beloved Penelope Layland , Canberra : Recent Work Press , 2022 23667987 2022 selected work poetry

'In 1778, Dorothy Wordsworth’s mother died, and the six-year-old Dorothy was sent to live with extended family. She never returned to the family home, and it was not until adolescence that Dorothy became reacquainted with her brother William. The two formed an intense and passionate emotional bond. By 1794 they were living together from that time would rarely be physically separated for more than a few weeks at a time, for the rest of their lives.

'Written in the voice of Dorothy, Beloved traces the progression of their relationship, from the ecstatic infatuation of youth onwards, drawing upon Dorothy’s diaries and letters as well as the recollections of friends and family members and literary and biographical scholarship.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

winner (Self-published) y separately published work icon Translating Loss : A Haiku Collection Maurice Nevile , Australian Capital Territory : Maurice Nevile , 2022 26404056 2022 selected work poetry

A collection of haiku dedicated to, and illustrated by, the poet's late wife: the poet began writing haiku after his wife's death in 2018.

Source: Author's introduction.

Year: 2021

winner (Small Press) y separately published work icon It's the Sugar, Sugar Sandra Renew , Canberra : Recent Work Press , 2021 20909006 2021 selected work poetry

'These poems move freely in time from the 1950s to the present day, from the contemporary to memoir, from gender politics to bushfires and floods. They show you jeeps, trucks, girlfriends and cane-cutters, widgies, Singer sewing machines, tattoos and rats and class grudges.

'Sandra Renew uses a range of traditional poetry forms to lay bare some of the gaping fault-lines of gender relations especially as they are experienced by LGBTIQ communities.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

winner (Big Press) y separately published work icon The Wear of My Face Lizz Murphy , North Melbourne : Spinifex Press , 2021 23092043 2021 selected work poetry

'The sun is our closest star just average a middle-aged dwarf past its prime but still a few billion years to go and fierce is its heat Its domains: interior surface atmospheres inner corona outer corona Did someone say Corona?

'The Wear of My Face is an assemblage of passing lives and landscapes, fractured worlds and realities. There is splintered text and image, memory and dream, newscast and conversation. Women wicker first light, old men make things that glow, poets are standing stones, frontlines merge with tourist lines. Lizz Murphy weaves these elements into the strangeness of suburbia, the intensity of waiting rooms, bush stillness, and hopes for a leap of faith as at times she leaves a poem as fragmented as a hectic day or a bombed street. What may sometimes seem like misdemeanours of the mind, to Lizz they are simply the distractions and disturbances of daily life somewhere. There is a rehomed greyhound, a breezy scientist, ancient malleefowl, beige union reps and people in all their conundrums. You might travel on a seagull’s wing or wing through the aerosphere.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Year: 2020

No shortlist for 'Big Press' for 2020.
winner (Small Press) y separately published work icon Nigh Penelope Layland , Canberra : Recent Work Press , 2020 20911182 2020 selected work poetry

'From the author of the award-winning Things I’ve thought to tell you since I saw you last comes a new collection of poems steeped in a sense of dark foreboding. Jumping from the global to the everyday, many of the poems in Nigh chime with the mood that all is not right with the world. Even in the seemingly mundane, or overtly beautiful, Layland finds some uncomfortable truths waiting to be unpicked. Nigh displays the confidence of a poet looking and thinking deeply about the world and offering it up in language as crisp as it is beguiling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

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