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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2016

winner y separately published work icon The Guardians Lucy Dougan , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2015 8597845 2015 selected work poetry

'Many poems in this collection explore the intrusions of 'the wild' into daily life, through memories, in illness, and in places that you've lost or left behind. Dougan is interested in the ways in which the past re-enters the present, particularly through the secrets of family life, in all kinds of atavism, and in pockets of wildness in the suburbs and the city which are a source of liveliness and a dark sort of energy. Her poems feature old houses, ruins, revisited places; they focus on the bonds between the generations, between children and adults, humans and animals, and humans and the physical world. The title of the collection refers broadly to these ties, which impose a sense of guardianship on those who are bound by them. In contrast to the wildness they recognise, the poems themselves seek to tread lightly - they aspire to quietness and reticence, to cumulative rather than immediate effects, and to sustaining a relatively natural and unobtrusive voice.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2014

winner y separately published work icon Six Different Windows Paul Hetherington , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2013 Z1916807 2013 selected work poetry

'Ranging across art and poetry, the past and the present, homelands and far-off lands, Six Different Windows meditates on childhood, riffs on mythology, and draws on the familiar. Paul Hetherington’s new collection chronicles life in all its beauty and strangeness.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2012

winner y separately published work icon Cumulus : Collected Poems Robert Gray , St Kilda : John Leonard Press , 2012 Z1893435 2012 selected work poetry 'This book is a landmark in Australian poetry. For Cumulus, Robert Gray has chosen all he wishes to retain from his eight volumes of poetry, some of it considerably and significantly revised. He has included here a new book, "Nameless Earth", not previously published in Australia.

'Gray has been a daring and original experimenter in the free verse line, and also at times with traditional forms. Equally, his work is notable for its frequent, uncanny rightness in the creation of images. His thinking shows a remarkable fluency in both Eastern and Western philosophies (Gray has referred to himself as a Buddhist heretic). These are all modernist pathways, and this poetry negotiates them with a lucid, classical temper.

'Most striking is an ever-alert immediacy—a perception and reflectiveness in the fluid moment. Whether through his sensuous language or his powerful engagement with ideas, Gray's poetry continually opens us to a fresh involvement with the physical world.' (From the publisher's website.)

Year: 2011

winner y separately published work icon The Argument : Poems Tracy Ryan , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 2011 Z1788479 2011 selected work poetry

Year: 2010

winner y separately published work icon Fire Diary Mark Tredinnick , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2010 Z1730985 2010 selected work poetry 'Fire Diary is the first book of poems by Mark Tredinnick, author of The Blue Plateau and The Little Red Writing Book. Fire Diary amounts to a spiritual geography of the poet, an everyday ecology of the "beautiful struggle, the ordinary trouble" he finds himself-we all find ourselves-in' (Publisher's blurb)

Works About this Award

Arts Cuts Will Reward Only the Unthinking Kate Middleton , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 5 April 2012; (p. 11)
At Home i "'I love your husband's verses, dear,'", M. D. , 1927 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Australian Woman's Mirror , 25 January vol. 3 no. 9 1927; (p. 16)
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