AustLit
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2020
winner y Nganajungu Yagu Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2019 16924590 2019 selected work poetry'Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters writen by that teenage daughter – me – handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter – me – remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga.
'In 1978–79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls’ hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known.
'Nganajungu Yagu was inspired by Mother’s letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors’ language – Badimaya and Wajarri – to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.
'–Charmain Papertalk Green' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2019
winner y Tilt Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2018 14000255 2018 selected work poetry'Tilt follows the skewed itinerary of attachment and loss, possession and dispossession; the movement of people and things, from Greta Garbo’s Manhattan exile to the Green Bans of 1970s Sydney to the precarious passages of deracinated subjects. In its detours through the copia of material history, lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, the book itself becomes a teeming repository of the real.' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2014
winner y Liquid Nitrogen Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2012 Z1928945 2012 selected work poetry