Alec Bolton Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Australian Poet
Subcategory of Australian Capital Territory Poetry Prize
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Notes

  • Inaugurated in 2005.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2011

winner y separately published work icon Darger : A Sequence of Poems Darger : His Girls Julie Chevalier , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2012 Z1833227 2012 sequence poetry

Henry Darger was an untrained artist and a social isolate who was obsessed with little girls. When he died in Chicago in 1973 at the age of 81, his work was completely unknown. Now his work is hung in major international art galleries and his innovative use of materials places him in the pop art milieu. The poems in this book tell the story of his life.


 

Year: 2010

winner y separately published work icon The Infinite Library Jillian Pattinson , 2010 (Manuscript version)x402147 Z1750275 2010 selected work poetry

Year: 2008

winner y separately published work icon Phantom Limb David Musgrave , 2008 St Kilda : John Leonard Press , 2010 Z1549987 2008 selected work poetry

'David Musgrave’s poems are at once meditative and restless, elegant and sensual – with an energy of empathy that draws him to a wealth of subjects. They are in several kinds of free verse and formal constraint. Here is wit and melancholy in equal measure, with a dose of joyous satire thrown in.

'Waterscapes and landscapes figure strongly. Typically they move from the moment of observation to make transformative connections with emotional and imaginative states: the continual freshness of approach from one to another of these poems is a hallmark.

'Other poems meet human situations more immediately. The self, or some other, is substantiated with a generosity of feeling — and this becomes a startling quality within the strands of satire in some poems, notably ‘The Baby Boomers’. Generosity also drives — as much as an elegant form does — ‘Young Montaigne Goes Riding’. Those two extended poems are peaks in a book of exuberant curiosity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2007

winner y separately published work icon Postcards from the Asylum From a Glass Kennel Karen Knight , Lauderdale : Pardalote Press , 2008 Z1453773 2008 selected work poetry With the title 'From a Glass Kennel.'

Year: 2006

winner y separately published work icon White Clay Lucy Dougan , 2006 Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2008 Z1340361 2006 selected work poetry 'A complex awareness of family life is at the heart of Lucy Dougan's new collection. Its narrative interweavings lead us from the world of books and romance into motherhood and its immersion in the world of children, then summon up, in turn, the poet's own childhood, and its barely recognised estrangements, 'the father that I did not know', and later a whole new family, to be reclaimed as her own. Dougan's poems are alive to the intimations which exist at 'the fugitive border of thought', and celebrate the imagination's power to mould, to recover, and to repair.' (Publisher's blurb)

Works About this Award

Angst Inspires Postcard Christopher Bantick , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Sunday Tasmanian , 6 January 2008; (p. 4)
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