A slew of poetry awards … for better and verse
There’s nothing more festive than its end-of-year Christmas party for Queensland Writers Centre to announce the Arts Queensland Poetry Awards and Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry.
The Arts Queensland Poetry Awards and Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry were presented, along with the annual Johnno Award, at the State Library of Queensland recently during the Queensland Writers Centre’s Christmas celebrations.
Eva Phillips’ Borrow-or-rob was named winner of the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript, with judges Jarad Bruinstroop and Eileen Chong calling the collection “an outstanding work that examines themes of place, appropriation and extraction through cross-disciplinary considerations of Margaret Preston’s printmaking and contemporaneous writing”.
Phillips will now work with prize partner University of Queensland Press (UQP) to develop the manuscript for publication. Sean West’s collection Only Guesswork was named runner-up.
Damen O’Brien won the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an unpublished poem for The Dam Dries, praised by judges Sarah Yeung and Yvette Holt as “a moving work that captures a moment filled with life yet hovering on the precipice of loss …” and “unerringly penetrative to the human psyche”. The Dam Dries will be published in literary magazine Westerly. Runner-up was Nikki McCahon for the poem I found an ant in my honey jar.
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Judges of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry, Julie Janson and Jeanine Leane, named Nathan “mudyi” Sentance’s Country centred metaphors/rockets as winner, describing the work as “a clever poem with some beautiful metaphors and evocative descriptors. A highly original piece … the humour and exploration of covert racism underpins the power”. The poem will be published in Meanjin’s 83.4 Summer edition in December. Runner-up was Vika Mana for Returning Home Again.
The Arts Queensland XYZ Prize for Spoken Word included development and mentorship opportunities with Australia Poetry Slam Champion Huda the Goddess. WA-based poet Vuma Phiri was named winner for An Apology To Myself and Kristal Brown as runner-up for Kissaway (Kanaka’s Song). Both will be published online by QWC.
This year for the first time QWC administered the suite of poetry awards, supported by Arts Queensland, increasing prize monies and two new publication partners (Meanjin for the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize; Westerly for the Val Vallis Award), with UQP continuing its longstanding relationship with the Shapcott Prize.
QWC acknowledged the Roderick Centre of Australian Literature at James Cook University in Townsville for its support of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry, along with the many leading international and Australian poets consulted in the process of hosting the awards and this year’s inaugural, flagship QPoetry! event.