Cirrus@Austlit

'The judging committee for this year’s Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize comprised Jill Jones, Shastra Deo and myself, Kate Middleton. The process we followed to determine this year’s shortlisted poems, commendation, runners-up and winner took place over many weeks. At the first stage, each of us read the full range of poems submitted to the prize and created our own longlists which we circulated to the other judges. With these longlists combined, we focused on the 25 poems that had struck us as sharing qualities of impressive craft and the ability to surprise. We also were interested in the range of work a poem can do, from narrative propulsion or linguistic metamorphosis to lyric meditation, as well as the forms it can take. In discussing the longlisted poems, we created a shortlist of ten poems (included in this issue). Here we both prized the quality of individual poems as well as the way a shortlist can showcase a real variety of poetries being written in Australia today. We noted with real pleasure the range of work we had to choose from, and the high quality of the poems entered into this year’s prize.' (Introduction)