The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets was established in 2007 to foster poetry by writers who have not yet published a book of poems under their own name.
It is named in honour of Judith Wright, one of Australia's best-loved poets.
The prize is supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and is the richest and most prestigious prize for emerging poets in Australia.
Source: http://overland.org.au/prizes/ Sighted: 29/11/2013.
'It has been a pleasure and an honour to judge the 2016 Judith Wright Prize for Emerging Poets. While reading the entries, we kept in mind Wright’s words on the central cultural role poetry plays:
I think poetry should be treated, not as a lofty art separated from life, but as a way of seeing and expressing not just the personal view, but the whole context of the writer’s times.
(Introduction)
Writing in June 1971 to the classical scholar and poet Martin Robertson, Judith Wright fondly remarked on a young man who was caretaking ‘Calanthe’, her forest home:
Now I am here again, and sharing the house with one of Meredith’s friends, a delightful young man who is reading his way onwards through all my books, hasn’t a penny and is technically on the run from the police, being a draft resister. [...] He has a very good mind, the kind that turns things over and comes up with the other side of them unexpectedly two days later as though the conversation was still going on. (Introduction)
