Shastra Deo Shastra Deo i(8540488 works by)
Born: Established:
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Fiji,
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South Pacific, Pacific Region,
;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, and a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing from The University of Queensland. In 2018, she was completing her PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, focusing on phantom limbs in war literature.

Her short work has been published in a number of Australian periodicals, and her first poetry collection, The Agonist, won the 2016 Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for 2018 the ALS Gold Medal.

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

2022 shortlisted Red Room Poetry Fellowship
2020 commended Tom Collins Poetry Prize for 'The Break'.

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Exclusion Zone St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2023 25274861 2023 selected work poetry

'You don’t remember this place. This land could be
arid or hungry or wet or rot. That does not matter. Your memory
can’t tell you what no longer exists.

'Beginning in the nuclear waste deposits of our future, The Exclusion Zone bears witness in a language degrading faster than the radioactive byproducts of our history and our present. At once prophecy and annihilation, these poems speak with ghosts, questioning how our words – and what they seek to preserve – can contend with the inevitability of their own decay. Nuclear materials drift throughout this collection, metastasising and resisting their own disposal. The Exclusion Zone is a poetry of warning, of séance, of incantation – a poetry of what survives, where the apocalypse-to-be manifests in human tenderness and vulnerability.' (Publication summary)

2024 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
Fishing at Caer A’Muirehen i "I forgot to say noon was closing around us. Further", 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 67 no. 2 2022; (p. 10)
2022 winner Patricia Hackett Prize
Variations on the Word Ghost i "hi!!", 2019 single work interview
— Appears in: Liminal , June 2019;
2022 shortlisted The Woollahra Digital Literary Award Poetry
Last amended 1 Mar 2021 11:24:00
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