The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Awards were established under the terms of Helen Anne Bell's will.
The Award is presented by University of Sydney's Department of English every two years, with a $7000 cash prize and publication with Vagabond Press. The Award is given to an Australian woman poet for a collection of previously unpublished poems.
'A fine-tuned book-length assemblage of dispersed ‘cerebral offcuts’, virtuosically inventing ‘the shape of a mood’. Nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual: ‘following some line’ of ‘live consciousness’, ‘inner in outer’, ‘what’s around’. Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax. Condensed, sharp pops of resonant fragments create their own fresh textures and juxtapositions.
'The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2021 judges (Kate Lilley, Pam Brown and Melinda Bufton) praised Running Time as 'nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual ... Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax.' (Publication summary)
Emily Stewart'Moxie traverses the office landscape of our collective psyche, restlessly moving between the interior monologue of daily ruminations and epic-like career narratives lying in wait. The hustle gives way to survival, cresting back into gritty victories via the feminist acquisition of corporate language. Open-plan everything, filing cabinets bursting; the promise of the ladder, beckoning you in.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
for unpublished manuscript 'Moxie'.