2023 Awardee

Judges comments:

‘The Water-Bearers is a book of exquisite skill and polish. In it, Madeleine Dale delivers rich and varied poems about water, revealing how it functions as the life-blood of our ecosystems but also our imaginations, energising romance and tragedy, troubling history and myth. This is lyric poetry at its best, sustaining both eye and ear, heart and mind.’

Madeleine Dale is a Brisbane-based poet and researcher. She holds a First Class Honours degree and Masters degree from the University of Queensland, where she is currently completing her PhD. Her first chapbook, On Fire with Dangerous Cargo, was published by Queensland Poetry in 2023.  

Runner-up

Judges comments:

‘Moonspinner is both an investigation of Sean West’s grandfather’s disappearance at sea and the poet’s experiences of saltwaterscapes. In full-hearted, controlled and glittering lyric and experimental poems and partly redacted factual ‘Findings’, West gently yet powerfully voices the silences around grief and loss; family photographs complement this solemn and buoyant collection. ‘Not all drowned things / are lost.’ 

Sean West is an autistic poet, disability support worker, and workshop facilitator. His recent shortlistings include the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award, the inaugural Born Writers Award, and the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. He is the founding editor of Blue Bottle Journal. Find him at www.callmemariah.com. 

Shortlist

‘Mitchell Welch’s Vehicular Man is formally varied, incorporating aphorism, elegy, sestina and villanelle, and varied in inspiration, from Federico García Lorca to Blixa Bargeld, Anastasia Romanova to J. D. Salinger. In thrilling, witty and wildly inventive poems that exist beneath ‘a Volkswagen-shaped cloud with its accelerator / depressed’, light dances with shadow, mythology mixes with history, and flesh grapples with bone.’

Mitchell Welch is a Gold Coast writer and freelance communications consultant. He has published poems, short stories and essays in a range of journals including Antipodes, Arena, Cordite, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit, Short Fiction, Southerly and Text. 

‘In Work Poems, D. Frederick Thomas exploits the acrostic form to astonishing effect, showing how, when it comes to the humble acrostic and the humble lives of those he uses it to depict, “nothing is ever / really as simple as it looks.” This is a collection of charismatic humility and skill.’

D. Frederick Thomas is a Brisbane-based writer, artist and (alongside his wife) home educating parent of two. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he holds an MFA from the University of Washington. His most recent journal appearance was in Fence back in 2014; since then, he has primarily produced artist books, zines and (again, alongside his wife) pseudonymous romance novels.

‘Motherland Away speaks from the space between two cultures and languages, drawing energy from dislocation and irreverence, boldly experimenting with what can and cannot be said. Describing the artist as “a shadow of doubt”, constantly defamiliarising any sense of certainty, Becca Wang announces herself as an exciting new voice in Australian poetry.’

Becca Wang is a writer and poet undertaking her BFA in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology. She is the winner of the 2022 Spark Prize and has been published in Cordite Poetry Review and shortlisted in the Wells Festival of Literature. Wang is also passionate about food writing and freelances for Broadsheet Media. 

‘Emma Simington’s is a distinctive, adroit and authentic voice, and Peculiar Times an irresistible, experimental and dazzling exploration of queer, trans and disabled experiences, taking in mind, body and spirit, forgetting and remembering, and the speculative and the real, and oscillating between the tones of Vanilla Coke and the Apocalypse. In these peculiar times we, like Simington, ‘cling to the flows // of love’. 

Emma Simington is a poet living on Yugambeh country. Her poems are in the pages of The Moth Magazine and Australian Poetry, among others. She has previously shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award. Emma is proudly neurodivergent and transgender.

In 2023 she will write discordant lesbian folk songs, bowl wides, and excitedly start reading books she is unlikely to finish.

‘What is this poem / then but digestive tract’ asserts Eva Phillips in her adventurous, energetic and accomplished collection that clarifies some of the intersections of language, bodies and food. Australian women cookbook authors, poets and painters rise from About Kitchens’ intelligent, political and ethical poems, blazingly drawing attention to past, present and future.’

Eva Phillips is a writer and arts worker born and raised in Meanjin. She holds a BA (Hons Class I) from Griffith University, works at a cinema, and directs the artist-led initiative, pps/FORA.