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Competitions and programs (105)

2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

01 June 2022 Written by Australian Book Review

Dan Disney was named the overall winner of the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize at an online ceremony on 19 January 2023 for his poem 'periferal, fantasmal'. The Porter Prize - Australia's most prestigious poetry competition - is worth a total of $10,000. This year’s judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Des Cowley and James Jiang – shortlisted five poems by Chris Andrews (NSW ), Chris Arnold (WA), Michelle Cahill (NSW ), Dan Disney (South Korea/Australia), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). The shortlisted poems were selected from 1,132 entries sent from thirty-four countries. They appear in the January–February issue of ABR.

The judges said this of ‘periferal, fantasmal’:

‘A tour de force of linguistic estrangements, “periferal, fantasmal” excavates the colonial history sedimented in the names that litter the landscape of the Gippsland region in Victoria. Through its comic neologisms and deft calibrations of lyric temporality, the poem replays the sanction for mineral extraction provided by exonymic nomination, reminding us of the scotch-soaked nightmare from which we are still trying to awake.’

On learning of his win, Dan Disney commented:

‘Peter Porter opens his poem “Landscape with Orpheus” with an epigraph from The Magic Flute – “You only live once, let that be enough for you!”. Poems like Porter’s generate not only wonder but also awed awareness (and, for me, a shift thereafter towards ethical, experimental rhetoric). I am dazzled to be in the bright reality of a moment like this. It is an incredible honour to receive a prize bearing the name of such a prodigiously enlivening, humanising poet.’

Prefacing their comments on the shortlist (each appraisal appears below the shortlisted poets), the judges said:

The judges were pleased to consider a rich and deep field of entries to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize this year, reflecting both the variety and strength of contemporary poetry, and many of its stylistic and thematic concerns. This year’s entries reflected a pronounced interest in climate issues and contemporary geopolitics, with a number of poems touching on recent floods and bushfires, species extinction, and the war in Ukraine. Many entries veered towards the experimental, and there were fewer lyric poems, love poems, and poems explicitly interested in established forms than in previous years. The outstanding poems on this year’s shortlist share an interest in political concerns refracted through their expression in language, including philology and etymology, and the power of listing, cataloguing, and naming. The five shortlisted poems engage with pressing subjects such as mining, colonial place naming, abortion, environmental degradation, and the relationship between the human and non-human worlds, but do so with subtlety, wit, and linguistic charge, rather than didacticism. Curiously, a taxonomic impulse manifests in several of the shortlisted poems, which probe the inflections, origins, and currency of words.

Reading the shortlisted poems

The shortlisted poems appear in our January–February 2023 issue and subscribers can read them here. The print edition is also available to purchase, simply click here and follow the prompts.

The five shortlisted poems are (in alphabetical order):

‘Loss-invaded Catalogue’ by Chris Andrews (Australia)

Chris AndrewsChris Andrews has taught at the Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney. He is the author of two collections of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). His study of the Oulipo, How to Do Things with Forms, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. Currently he is translating You Glow in the Dark by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi. 

Judges: ‘Loss-Invaded Catalogue’ marshals the satirical potential of the tetrameter line into a deadpan critique of the intractability of the new systems – romantic, informational, or industrial – to which we are all made to subscribe. Lifting away the bureaucratic pallor that has become the most visible alibi for violence in our contemporary world, the poem deploys lyrical perception against the mortmain of cliché and institutionalised groupthink.

 

‘Running Up That Bill’ by Chris Arnold (Australia)

Chris ArnoldChris Arnold lives in Perth, on Whadjuk Noongar country. Chris was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and he’s currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. He specialises in electronic literature. 

Judges: Rife with argot and acerbic wit, “Running Up that Bill” mashes up open-cut mining, news headlines, and pop culture to create a patchwork view of an Australia that venerates the wrong gods. Toggling between Kate Bush, Cold Chisel, the excesses of Surfers Paradise, and the destruction of the Juukan Gorge, the poet garners breakneck momentum over a virtuosic single sentence, offering a dark vision of a nation in thrall to our faded wrecks of ‘culture’ –half-hallucinated, half-real – where ‘the dog track’s still going and the emu’s / on tap’.

 

‘Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest’ by Michelle Cahill (Australia)

Michelle CahillMichelle Cahill (she/they) is an Australian novelist and poet of Indian heritage who lives in Sydney. Daisy & Woolf is published by Hachette. Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) was awarded the NSW Premier's Literary Award for New Writing. Their prizes include the Red Room Poetry Fellowship, the Val Vallis Award, the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize, and a shortlisting in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Their work appears in The Best of Australian PoemsHEATPlumwood MountainKalliope X and The Kenyon Review.

Judges: Tapping into a rich tradition of seafaring idiom, ‘Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest’ presents a collage of voices crossing centuries: mariners and poets, journalists and technocrats. Summoning Coleridge’s metaphorical bird, and sure-footed in its naming, the poem plots a line between slavery, damaged food chains, over-harvesting of marine resources, clogged and polluted beaches, ‘creaking landfill’. Woven from the language of shipboard journals, Māori place names, maps, newspaper reports, these patchwork notes posit extinction as an endgame, consumed at ‘high speed’.

 

‘periferal, fantasmal’ by Dan Disney (South Korea/Australia) (winner)

Dan Disney’s most recent collection of poems, accelerations & inertias, (Vagabond Press 2021), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. Together with Matthew Hall, he is the editor of New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (Palgrave 2021). He teaches with the English Department at Sogang University, in Seoul. 

Judges: A tour de force of linguistic estrangements, ‘periferal, fantasmal’ excavates the colonial history sedimented in the names that litter the landscape of the Gippsland region in Victoria. Through its comic neologisms and deft calibrations of lyric temporality, the poem replays the sanction for mineral extraction provided by exonymic nomination, reminding us of the scotch-soaked nightmare from which we are still trying to awake.

 

‘Abiquiu, New Mexico’ by Raisa Tolchinsky (United States)

Raisa TolchinskyRaisa Tolchinsky writes about love, grief, and the wisdom of the body. She is the recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and two Pushcart Prize nominees in poetry. Raisa earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and her BA from Bowdoin College. She is trained as an amateur boxer. Her chapbook Number One Deadliest, an eco-poetic meditation on boxing and climate grief, was published with the Under Review in 2021. She was shortlisted in the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Currently, Raisa is the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. 

Judges: ‘Abiquiu, New Mexico’, compelling in its brevity, strikes the reader like a blow to the solar plexus. Shifting gears between clinical terminology and wide-open desert landscapes, it careens between rage and beauty, loss and renewal. Rendered in the irreducible language of the heart, free of cliché and sentimentality, the poem’s unembellished phrasing – ‘mother tongue emptied into ordinary language’ – confronts the limits of speech, asking how it is possible to express ‘impossible grief’.

 


Congratulations to the full longlist:

Chris Andrews (NSW), ‘Loss-Invaded Catalogue’Shortlisted

Steve Armstrong (NSW), ‘When night is the mother of wisdom’Longlisted

Chris Arnold (WA), ‘Running Up That Bill’– Shortlisted

Luke Beesley (VIC), ‘Tilde and author’ – Longlisted

Michelle Cahill (NSW), ‘Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest’ – Shortlisted

Eva Da (US), ‘Foreign Skies’ – Longlisted

Dan Disney (Korea), ‘periferal, fantasmal’ – Shortlisted

Dave Drayton (NSW), ‘The gold is gone’ – Longlisted

Katie Hale (England), ‘Titania’ – Longlisted

Dimitra Harvey (NSW), ‘Feral’ ­– Longlisted

Rhian Healy (VIC), ‘Full Throttle’ – Longlisted

Julie Janson (NSW), ‘Kurraarr Far Country’ – Longlisted

Rosa Lane (US), ‘Foxglove [disambiguation]’ – Longlisted

Penelope Layland (VIC), ‘The paddy melon wars’ – Longlisted

James Lucas (NSW), ‘Trip advisor’ – Longlisted

Kirsten McAteer (US), ‘Cows’ –  ­ Longlisted

Isabella Mead (VIC), ‘Bonnethead’ – Longlisted

Damen O’Brien (QLD), ‘The pelican feeder’­ –  Longlisted

Mark O’Flynn (NSW), ‘For Sale, The Most Beautiful Object in the World’ – Longlisted

Karen Petersen (US), ‘My Long Island’ – Longlisted

Peter Ramm (NSW), ‘On Seeing the Statue of Darius from Susa’ – Longlisted

Amritha Selvarajaguru (US), ‘milkteeth & the love of the shark’ – Longlisted

Meredith Stricker (US), ‘Autopoiesis’ – Longlisted

Raisa Tolchinsky (US), ‘Abiquiu, New Mexico’ – Shortlisted       

Gabriela Valencia (US), ‘Death, Whistle’ – Longlisted


To stay updated on the Porter Prize and Australian Book Review’s other prizes, please sign up for our ‘Prizes and Programs’ newsletter.


We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Morag Fraser AM and Andrew Taylor AM and support in memory of Kate Boyce.

2022 Calibre Essay Prize Winner and Shortlist


D
istinguished classical musician Simon Tedeschi has won the sixteenth Calibre Essay Prize, worth a total of $7,500. 

Tedeschi receives $5,000 for his essay ‘This Woman My Grandmother’, while the runner-up, Sarah Gory receives $2,500 for her submission, ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’. The winning essay was published in the May 2022 issue of ABR. The runner-up essay appeared in the September 2022 issue.

The judges – Declan Fry, Beejay Silcox and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – selected a shortlist of twelve essays from a field of 569 entries from seventeen different countries. The ten other essays making up the shortlist are listed below.

Congratulations to Simon Tedeschi and all the writers shortlisted in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize!


In ‘This Woman My Grandmother’, Tedeschi explores his grandmother’s story:

‘My grandmother, a Polish Jew, the only survivor of a family obliterated by the Nazis, wrote a memoir of her wartime years shortly before she died sixteen years ago. Only recently was I able to bring myself to read it. When I did, it caused not only a torrent of memory to erupt but spurred me to find out more about this tormented woman who, despite her vociferousness and overbearing presence, was the bearer of secrets too painful to divulge.’

The judges commented on Simon Tedeschi’s essay:

This year’s winning essay has a powerful, memorable duality: it’s at once forceful and gentle, timeless and timely. While Tedeschi plays with eternal themes – the fragility of memory and intergenerational anguish – there is also a quiet urgency to his account of his grandmother, Lucy’s, complicated legacy. We stand on the cusp of a great forgetting: the Holocaust is fading from living memory, and Covid is ravaging our elderly. As we lose our story-keepers and war rages in Europe, it feels vital not just to honour the past, but to acknowledge its knots and nuances. That is what Tedeschi has done in this remarkable essay, with grace, care, and glorious prose craft.


2022 Calibre Essay Prize Shortlist:

Linda Atkins (NSW): ‘Shouting Abortion’
Jessie Berry-Porter (Vic): ‘Milos As a Symbol’
Chrysanthi Diasinos (NSW): ‘Οι παρχαρομάνες και το χρυσόραμμαν’
Michael Garbutt (NSW): ‘The Museum of Mankind’
Savannah Hollis (Vic): ‘The Diary of a Bottom Bitch’     
Heather Taylor Johnson (SA): ‘The Giving and Taking Away of Voice’
Michaela Keeble (NZ): ‘The Bind: On Reading’    
Emma Shortis (Vic): ‘American Guns’
Kirsten Tranter (USA): ‘The Time of Writing’
Miriam Webster (Vic): ‘The Trouble with Endings’

2022 Jolley Prize Judges

20 January 2022 Written by Australian Book Review

 

Amy BaillieuAmy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of Australian Book Review. She completed a Masters of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne in 2011 and holds a Bachelor of Arts from the same university. Prior to becoming Deputy Editor of ABR in 2012, she worked in other editorial roles at the magazine and was Philanthropy Manager from 2011–12. She regularly reviews fiction for ABR and also works as a freelance editor. 

 

 

 

 

Melinda HarveyMelinda Harvey is a book critic who has written for a wide variety of publications, including ABR, since 2004. She is on the judging panel of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2017-present) and works on the Stella Count. She currently holds a JUNCTURE Fellowship for Mid-Career and Established Critics at the Sydney Review of Books and is Lecturer in English at Monash University.

 

 

 

  

John KinsellaJohn Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the short story collection Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021) and the poetry collection Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). The first volume of his Collected Poems, The Ascension of Sheep, is due out shortly with UWAP (2022). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of The Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.

2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Winner

19 January 2022 Written by Australian Book Review

Anthony Lawrence is the winner of the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize worth a total of $10,000. This was announced at an online ceremony on January 19.

Anthony receives $6,000 for his winning poem, 'In the Shadows of Our Heads', while the four other shortlisted poets – Chris Arnold, Dan Disney, Michael Farrell, and Debbie Lim – each receive $1,000. The full shortlist, including the winning poem, is available to read online and is published in the January–February issue of ABR

This year’s judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani – shortlisted five poems from 1,328 entries, from 34 countries.

Congratulations to Anthony Lawrence and to all the poets shortlisted and longlisted in the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize!


In their report the judges noted:

Brimming with surprise, supple, pitch-perfect imagery, linguistic energy and wit, ‘In the Shadows of Our Heads’ is a stunningly vibrant poem by a masterful technician at the top of his game. This unusual love poem revels in the unpredictability of those connections, intellectual and physical, forged between simpatico minds and damaged bodies across space and time. A vivid, potent reminder of love’s dance of proximity and distance – at a time when these fundamental bases of human intimacy have been thrown into fraught relief – it is a work deftly attuned to our present moment.

 


 

In the Shadows of Our Heads
by Anthony Lawrence

 

I’d called the Humane Society to report the neglect
of a neighbour’s dogs. A woman assured me there
would be an investigation, took my details, then asked
if I needed more assistance. I mentioned the flightless

swans of Malta, and she said Imagine, ten thousand years,
then added They were the size of the pygmy elephants
that also roamed the island. To test her liability
to respond in a capering manner, I described the pattern

of my sleep and how, after drinking Akvavit, my cells
become part of the dust of the Horse Head Nebula.
Your astral projection is world class, she said. I could
see a swivel chair, the noise-cancelling headset, a light

blue blouse embroidered with a hook or claw symbol,
the windows of light on her shoes. Are your projections
always so peregrinatory? I’m curious, as I sense I’m far
too fond of the regional. Satisfied, I felt compelled to ask

if Spring, in the mountains, had ever crossed her radar
as a good season and reason for marriage, but chose
instead to invite her for a drink. I don’t date, but we
could drive, as long as you’re partial to Elgar’s

‘Nimrod’, anything by Wagner, and my minder, Karl,
who, depending on his mood, likes to follow at a clip
or respectful distance in his Beamer. I laughed. Alright,
she said, His name is Bob, he’s either a serial tail-gater,

or he moves like a tortoise in his Triumph Mayflower.
On Sunday morning, her music darkening the speakers,
we passed the wreckage of housing estates, then onto
a road lined with trees that cast flickering lines

of light and shade like a view through the arrow-slit
of a zoetrope. We opened the past and found things
worth sharing. As a child she’d been orphaned when,
escaping a forest fire, the family car had come adrift

in smoke and driven off a bridge. She had lost an eye
and her spine had been broken. The monocular vision
and limp had ended her ribbon-floor exercise routine.
When we met, she had approached like someone

leaning into wind. I told her I’d stolen meteor samples
from an observatory on a school excursion. This had led
to frequent stealing, and when I said kleptomania,
I lowered my voice and concluded the confession

with the words illness, serial, and the eight-point-turn
of psychopharmacological. When we stopped for lunch,
I sat across from her by a river whose patchwork surface
she described as snake skins sewn haphazardly together.

I saw the glass eye, and she said Ocular. Three perfect
syllables, then they ruined everything with Prosthesis.
Her hand hovered briefly over mine before moving on.
I said nothing and she took a long time to answer it.

We discussed rescue dogs and how certain bats would
make good pets if only their bites weren’t potentially
lethal, causing fever and delirium. At fifteen, she had
run away to live in a trilogy of Mervyn Peake novels.

I suggested we return via a pub where the Guinness
is collared velvet, the music live. As we stood, the flame
of a kingfisher fluttered on like a pilot light and went out
in the shadows of our heads.

 

_____________

 

Anthony LawrenceAnthony Lawrence has published sixteen books of poems, the most recent being Ken (Life Before Man, 2020). His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, and the Blake Poetry Prize. A new book of poems, Ordinary Time, a collaboration with the poet Audrey Molloy, is to be published in 2022. He teaches Creative Writing at Griffith University, Queensland, and lives on Moreton Bay.


Further information

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards.

Subscribe to ABR to gain access to this issue online, plus the ABR archive.

Click here for more information about past winners.

We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Morag Fraser AM and Andrew Taylor AM.

2022 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

16 November 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

ABR is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. The shortlisted stories, which appear in our August issue, are (in alphabetical order): 

Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen
Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis
Whale Fall’ by C.J. Garrow

The overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500, will be announced at a special online ceremony at 6pm on 11 August. This is a free event and all are welcome but please contact us to register your interest at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so that we can send you the Zoom link on the morning of the event.

The 2022 Jolley Prize was judged by Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella. The judges’ report, as well as the full longlist, can be found below. 

The Jolley Prize Shortlist

Jolley shortlisted authorsThe 2022 Jolley Prize shortlisted authors
(L-R): Nina Cullen, Tracy Ellis, and C.J. Garrow

Nina Cullen for Dog Park

Nina Cullen is a Newcastle-based writer whose work has appeared in various Australian and international publications. She has just finished a collection of linked short stories and is working on a novel.

Tracy Ellis forNatural Wonder

Tracy Ellis lives in Sydney and works as an editor in digital and print media. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from UTS and was previously longlisted for ABR’s Calibre Essay Prize.

C.J. Garrow for Whale Fall

C.J. Garrow is a Melbourne writer whose fiction has been shortlisted for various international prizes. His story ‘Egg Timer’ was shortlisted in the 2020 Jolley Prize.

Full longlist

‘by the hour’ by Diana Clarke (New Zealand)
‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen (NSW) - shortlisted
‘Case Notes’ by Sonja Dechian (Vic.)
‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis (NSW) - shortlisted
‘Whale Fall’ by C.J. Garrow (Vic.) - shortlisted
‘And Then There Is Pink’ by Madison Griffiths (Vic.)
‘Glads’ by Susan Hettinger (United States)
‘half-moons filled with jam’ by Andy Kovacic (NSW)
‘Born for You’ by Magdalena McGuire (Vic.)
‘The Mend’ by Bruce Meyer (Canada)
‘Blowing Up’ by Alec Patrić (Vic.)
‘Not-John’ by Jonathan Ricketson (Vic.)
‘Zamek’ by Alex Skovron (Vic.)
‘human material’ by Tracey Slaughter (New Zealand)


Judges Comments

This year we received 1338 stories from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and the magazine. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community across a range of genres. Here are the judges’ comments on the three shortlisted stories (presented here, as in the issue, in alphabetical order):

In the tense and atmospheric story ‘Dog Park’, Georgie takes her young son Max on a midday visit to the park where she watches from a shaded bench while he plays. Georgie’s protective love for her son infuses the story even as her desperate longing to shield him from potential pain or humiliation leads to growing tensions and an unsettling confrontation. ‘Dog Park’ is a tender examination of the evolving relationship between an anxious mother and her growing child that is filled with nuanced observations and telling details. The complex interactions between the characters in this story are particularly convincing.

In ‘Natural Wonder’, the narrator watches over three boys – her son and his two cousins – as they spend the first days of a new year playing at a beach on Sydney harbour. This story of children swimming and fencing with toy lightsabers on the sand has a gently melancholic undertow: it emerges that the cousins have experienced the recent trauma of losing their mother. The narrator feels a strong urge to protect and comfort her nephews but she is also drawn to ideas of escape and freedom. The story is remarkable for its quietness, acknowledgement of knotty feelings, and the room it makes for small miracles.

The bullying of Bernard Tusk at a school for boys ‘of shallow prospects’ is conveyed in a wry, uncanny, and almost defamiliarising way in ‘Whale Fall’, which uses the beaching of a whale carcass as a metaphor for pointless death. As an implicated but also threatened observer, the narrator takes us through the destruction of Tusk who, like all the younger boys, vaguely seeks ‘cool’, but can’t attain it. The triggering complicity of the narrator is both strangely self-exonerating and self-accusatory as he tries to figure out his role between collusion and empathy. The story skilfully examines a fraught complicity and guilt.

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

2022 Calibre Essay Prize Judges

07 October 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

Declan FryDeclan Fry is a writer, poet, and essayist. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, he was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2020 and awarded the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship for the Meanjin essay ‘Justice for Elijah or a Spiritual Dialogue With Ziggy Ramo, Dancing’. His work has appeared in Australian Book Review, Liminal, The Monthly, The Guardian, Overland, Westerly, and elsewhere. Twitter: @_declanfry.

 

 

Beejay SilcoxBeejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, and the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appear in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her award-winning short stories have been published at home and abroad, and have been selected for a number of Australian anthologies.

 

Peter RosePeter Rose has been Editor of Australian Book Review since 2001. Previously he was a publisher at Oxford University Press. His reviews and essays have appeared mostly in ABR. He has published six books of poetry, two novels, and a family memoir, Rose Boys (Text Publishing), which won the 2003 National Biography Award. 

 

21 July 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

Calibre Logo 2021 copy 

Entries have now closed for the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize. We thank everyone who entered. Judging is now underway. We will name the winners in the May 2022 issue.


Status: Closed for entries

Prize money: $7,500

Open until: 17 January 2022, 11:59 pm 

Judges: Declan Fry, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox  

 


 

Past winners

Click the link for more information about past winners and to read their essays.

 

FAQs and Terms and Conditions

Please read our Frequently Asked Questions before contacting us with queries about the Calibre Prize.

Before entering the Calibre Essay Prize, all entrants must read the Terms and Conditions.

 

Exclusivity

Entries may be offered elsewhere during the judging of the Calibre Prize. If an entrant is longlisted and has their essay offered elsewhere, the entrant will have 24 hours to decide if they would like to withdraw their essay on offer elsewhere or from the Calibre Prize. Exclusivity is essential for longlisted essays. The overall winning essay will be published in the magazine in the May 2022 issue with the runner-up to be published later in the year.

 

Entry fees

Current ABR subscribers: $15
Standard/non subscribers: $25*

*All non-subscribers will automatically receive four-month digital access to ABR free of charge.

 

Entry + subscription bundles

Entry + 1-year digital subscription: $80
Entry + 1-year print subscription (Australia): $100
Entry + 1-year print subscription (NZ and Asia): $190
Entry + 1-year print subscription (Rest of World): $210

Those who purchase a subscription while entering will be able to submit subsequent entries at the subscriber rate ($15).


ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan.

2022 Porter Prize Judges

13 July 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

Sarah Holland-BattSarah Holland-Batt is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Aria and The Hazards (UQP), and a forthcoming volume of essays on contemporary poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry (UQP, 2021). She is the recipient of a number of honours, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and a Sydney Myer Creative Fellowship. As of 2021, she is the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, and works as a Professor at QUT.

 

Jaya SavigeJaya Savige’s most recent collection is Change Machine (UQP 2020). He is Assistant Professor of English and Head of Creative Writing at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University, and Poetry Editor for The Australian. His previous collections include Latecomers, which won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and Surface to Air, shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier’s Prize. He read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, and has held Australia Council residencies at the B.R. Whiting Library, Rome, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

 

Anders VillaniAnders Villani holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for poetry. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press. A PhD candidate at Monash University, he lives in Melbourne.

 

2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

12 May 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. First presented in 2005, the Porter Prize is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new poem. It is worth a total of $10,000.

This year, our judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani – had 1,330 poems to assess. Prefacing their comments on the shortlist (each appraisal appears below the shortlisted poets), the judges said:

This year’s entries to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize were richly impressive and varied, among which the shortlisted poems – focused on Australia’s recreational hunting culture, mathematics and computation, family abuse, the outset of love, and, metapoetically, the state of Australian poetry itself – impressed with their formal mastery, lyricism, and wit. Broadly, the judges observed that the entries this year tended away from briefer lyric and elegiac modes in favour of expansive poems with a more immediate political and social justice focus. The five accomplished shortlisted poems each share a narrative bent, a focus on form (four out of five are stanzaic), and a capacity to startle and surprise with vivid imagery, linguistic torque, humour, and juxtaposition.

Reading the shortlisted poems

The shortlisted poems will appear in our January–February 2022 issue. The print edition is available to purchase now, simply click here and follow the prompts.

 

 

The five shortlisted poems are:

 

'Sixes and sparrows' by Chris Arnold (WA, Australia)

Chris ArnoldChris Arnold is a poet and software engineer from Perth, on Whadjuk Noongar country. Chris is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. Chris specialises in electronic literature and information security, and he is the recipient of a Queensland Literary Award for a collaboration with David Thomas Henry Wright. He is the outgoing web editor for Westerly, and his work has appeared in Westerly, Cordite, and ABR’s States of Poetry.

Judges: Framed by an epigraph from the cryptographer and cyber-security analyst Bruce Schneier, ‘Sixes and Sparrows’ is an enigmatic, deeply absorbing work that blurs the boundaries between human consciousness and the mathematical, computational networks that govern much of our contemporary lives. Composed in an impressively sustained poetics of parataxis and disjunction, this poem’s rhizomatic bouquet, a cluster of synaptic firings, reveals connections between such seemingly disparate phenomena as binary logic and human touch, memory and taxidermy, email transfer protocols and the poet’s orphic descent into networked language.

 

'Gippslanding (triptych)' by Dan Disney (South Korea/Australia)

Dan DisneyDan Disney’s most recent books are accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press, 2021) and the anthology New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave, 2021). His writing appears in Angelaki, Kenyon Review, Antipodes, Orbis Litterarum, and CounterText, and he is a regular reviewer with World Literature Today. He teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea.

Judges: Balancing ode and lament on its blade-edge, this poem ventures a coruscating and radically original mythopoetic of Australia’s (white, male) recreational hunting culture. The poet’s lyrical attention to the instant and whipcrack enjambments evoke the hunt in its drama and decadence, barbarism and fraternity. Steeped in vernacular, rigorous in its critique, tensioned by the conflict between Graeco-Roman and Indigenous systems of understanding, the poem represents an important enquiry into a sphere of Australian life rarely glimpsed on the page. 

 

'Australianesque' by Michael Farrell (Vic., Australia)

Michael FarrellMichael Farrell’s books include Family Trees and I Love Poetry (both published by Giramondo), the scholarly Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan), and, as editor, Ashbery Mode (TinFish), an Australian tribute to John Ashbery. Born in Bombala, NSW, in 1965, Michael has lived in Melbourne since 1990. Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. 

Judges: Thrillingly unpredictable, satirical and stylish, this playful metapoetic sonnet sequence conjures the ghost of an unpublished poem the speaker insists was written by the late Peter Porter about Christopher Brennan. Inhabiting the personae, variously, of Brian Castro and Helen Garner, the mercurial and shapeshifting speaker – by turns a writer, scholar, and poet –suggests that a degree of impersonation, slippage between identities, or even imposture is central to the spirit of Australian poetry, dragging Gwen Harwood’s famous acrostic hoaxes, Ned Kelly, and Ted Hughes along for the exhilarating ride.

 

'In the Shadows of Our Heads' by Anthony Lawrence (QLD, Australia)

Anthony LawrenceAnthony Lawrence has published sixteen books of poems, the most recent being Ken (Life Before Man, 2020). His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, and the Blake Poetry Prize. A new book of poems, Ordinary Time, a collaboration with the poet Audrey Molloy, is to be published in 2022. He teaches Creative Writing at Griffith University, Queensland, and lives on Moreton Bay.

Judges: Brimming with surprise, supple, pitch-perfect imagery, linguistic energy and wit, ‘In the Shadows of Our Heads’ is a stunningly vibrant poem by a masterful technician at the top of his game. This unusual love poem revels in the unpredictability of those connections, intellectual and physical, forged between simpatico minds and damaged bodies across space and time. A vivid, potent reminder of love’s dance of proximity and distance – at a time when these fundamental bases of human intimacy have been thrown into fraught relief – it is a work deftly attuned to our present moment.

 

'Hummingbird Country' by Debbie Lim (NSW, Australia)

Debbie LimDebbie Lim’s poems have appeared regularly in the Best Australian Poems series and in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, among other anthologies. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Meanjin, Westerly, Overland, Mascara Literary Review, and Island. She has received the ArtsACT Rosemary Dobson Award. Her chapbook, Beastly Eye, was published by Vagabond Press, and she is working on a full-length collection. She lives in Sydney.

Judges: A masterly exhibition of poetry’s capacity to blur boundaries: between tragic and comic; between literal and surreal; between sincerity and play; between climax and bathos. In this moving work, an ostensibly simple premise blossoms, through arresting imagery and an exquisite command of caesura, into a testament to the imagination’s resilience. Such is the poet’s control of their subject matter here that every line feels tuned for maximum suspense and surprise, yet remains spacious, yielding neither poignancy nor levity. A rare, and luminous, balance.

 


Congratulations to the full longlist:

 

Chris Arnold (WA), ‘Sixes and sparrows’ Shortlisted
Emily Barker (UK),River song’ – Longlisted
Katherine Brabon (Vic.),Autoimmune’ – Longlisted
Nandi Chinna (WA),Glomerular Filtration Rate 11’ – Longlisted
Eileen Chong (NSW), ‘Curlew’ – Longlisted
Eileen Chong (NSW), ‘Dream Kitchen’ – Longlisted
Eileen Chong (NSW),Letters Without Stamps’ – Longlisted
Dan Disney (South Korea/Australia), ‘Gippslanding (triptych)’ Shortlisted
Michael Farrell (Vic.), ‘Australianesque’ – Shortlisted
Joan Fleming (Vic.),Ambition’ – Longlisted
Jennifer Fraser (Canada),Blue Sky of the Brain’ – Longlisted
Lou Garcia-Dolnik (NSW),Why Some People in the Philippines Are Living with the Dead (A VICE Documentary)’ – Longlisted
Maddie Godfrey (WA),Pretty Sick’ – Longlisted
Jake Goetz (NSW),The Feed’ – Longlisted
Benjamin Halliwell (NSW),Thinking of Bullocky’ – Longlisted
Jennifer Harrison (Vic.),Mandelbrot Set’ – Longlisted
Anthony Lawrence (QLD),In the Shadows of Our Heads’ – Shortlisted
Debbie Lim (NSW),Hummingbird Country’ – Shortlisted
Audrey Molloy (NSW),Evening, Rushcutters Bay’ – Longlisted
Damen O'Brien (QLD),The Gallery of Winds’ – Longlisted
Robyn Rowland (NSW),Precision’ – Longlisted
Ann Shenfield (Vic.),A treatment’ – Longlisted
Sian Vate (Vic.),roughly’ – Longlisted
Tais Rose Wae (NSW),Reading Scribbly Gum’ – Longlisted

 


Click here for more information about past winners and to read their poems.

We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Morag Fraser AM and Andrew Taylor AM.

Payment Complete – Elizabeth Jolley Prize

03 May 2021 Written by Australian Book Review

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