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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon The Lost Arabs Omar Sakr , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2019 15423160 2019 selected work poetry

'Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon Sun Music : New and Selected Poems Judith Beveridge , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2018 13182748 2018 selected work poetry

'Sun Music collects Beveridge’s best poems published over a thirty-year period, from 1987 to 2017. She has selected the poems from her award-winning collections, The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey, and included 33 new poems which build on and enhance her previous work. Beveridge is an exacting poet, precise and controlled, and her formal discipline gives added intensity to her expression of emotion. The combination of clarity and dramatic force, involving a supple use of language which registers the ebb and flow of feeling, makes her poetry immediately appealing and accessible. As she notes in her introduction to this collection, ‘My writing can be kaleidoscopic, often baroque, but I hope also grounded and focused…I am drawn to poetry that has rich texture, and by this, I mean poetry that is distinctly metaphorical, detailed, musically complex, but also clear.’'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2018

winner y separately published work icon Blindness and Rage : A Phantasmagoria : A Novel in Thirty-four Cantos Brian Castro , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2017 10868663 2017 single work novel

'Suffering from a fatal disease, Lucien Gracq travels to Paris to complete the epic poem he is writing and live out his last days. There he joins a secret writers’ society, Le club des fugitifs, that guarantees to publish the work of its members anonymously, thus relieving them of the burdens of life, and more importantly, the disappointments of authorship. In Paris, Gracq finds himself crossing paths with a parade of phantasms, illustrious writers from the previous century – masters of identity, connoisseurs of eroticism, theorists of game and rule, émigrés and Oulipeans. He flees from the deathly allure of the Fugitives, and towards the arms of his beloved – but it may be too late.

'Written in thirty-four cantos, Blindness & Rage recalls Virgil and Dante in its descent into the underworld of writing, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin with its mixture of wonder and melancholy. The short lines bring out the rhythmic qualities of Castro’s prose, enhance his playfulness and love of puns, his use of allusion and metaphor. Always an innovator, in Blindness & Rage he again throws down a challenge to the limits of the novel form.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2017

winner y separately published work icon Headwaters Anthony Lawrence , World Square : Pitt Street Poetry , 2016 9486641 2016 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)

Year: 2016

winner y separately published work icon The Hazards Sarah Holland-Batt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2015 8360380 2015 selected work poetry

'Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive new collection from award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt. Opening with a vision of a leveret's agonizing death by Myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards both real and imagined. Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory - from haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershoi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound - and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt's mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer 'straight into turbulence'.' (Publication summary)

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