Seven women poets shortlisted for Australia's richest poetry prize
The 2021 judges reviewed 309 unpublished manuscripts by Australian women poets to determine a shortlist of seven stunning entries. The winner of the $40,000 prize will be announced at a ceremony on 12 November.
The Department of English at the University of Sydney is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for 2021. The winner will be announced by Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott at the on Friday, 12 November 2021.
The biennial Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award is funded by the generous bequest of a former student of the University 鈥� Helen Anne Bell.聽This year the award offers an increased prize of $40,000 for a collection of poems by an Australian woman poet and its publication by聽. This is the fourth biennial award made under the bequest, and it is now the richest poetry prize in Australia.
The 2021 judges were Kate Lilley, Pam Brown and Melinda Bufton (2019 Helen Anne Bell Award winner). They wrote: 鈥淭his year 309 book-length manuscripts were entered in this unique and uniquely generous prize for an unpublished poetry manuscript by an Australian woman."
"We were as amazed by the avalanche of manuscripts submitted as we were delighted by their quality and range. A good number should find their way to publication, and we sincerely hope they will. From a long longlist it was our unenviable task to select just seven finalists. Congratulations to all the shortlisted poets on their stunning manuscripts!鈥�
Judges鈥� comments on the shortlisted works (in alphabetical order):
Michelle Cahill, Dark
These compelling poems centre the experience of a brown-skinned woman, with skeptical intelligence and intensity: 'What my dark skin has taught me is not to trust white words'. Cahill addresses Australia鈥檚 violent, racist, colonial history in its worldwide entanglements, melding private mourning with public accountability, in order to stake out a transformatively 鈥榳ild鈥� language, ethics and politics 鈥榳ith a tongue that pushes and probes/our history鈥檚 darkest cavities鈥�.
Joan Fleming, Dirt
Writing and thinking through the place of a 'white visitor' on Indigenous land, Fleming鈥檚 project is an experiment in freshly negotiated meaning and text-making with explicit permission: 鈥榠t has been with the generosity, trust, and willingness of my Warlpiri friends and teachers that the poems in this book have been allowed and enabled to come into being鈥�. The resulting work draws the reader into these vital questions of 鈥榣ifelong responsibility鈥� and emergent possibility: 鈥業f it is written down, what then鈥�.
Jeanine Leane, Gawimarra-Gathering
A powerhouse of vivid imagery, language and story, Gawimarra-Gathering is a work of personal and collective history. Through eloquent resistance, custodianship and witnessing, Leane offers a poetic path towards healing: 鈥榬estore-regenerate-remember鈥�, 鈥榳ake up every day stronger than all our traumas鈥�.
Claire Miranda Roberts, Kangaroo Paw
In love with restraint and paradoxes of scale (鈥榯he largest eucalypts have the smallest flowers鈥�), these minimalist, phenomenological lyrics in the spirit of Dickinson and Niedecker revere their interstices, enigmas and openings. Roberts explores the poetic interface and in-florescence of subjectivity, language and nature: 鈥業f I stay long enough/I may become/everything around me鈥�.
Emma Simington, Peculiar Times
Peculiar Times delivers a blast of speculative and fantastic tableaux, infectious in its energy and excess. An exuberant queer, trans, disabled memoir of apocalyptic end-times, Peculiar Times is 鈥榩eculiar鈥� in all the best ways - uncommon, offbeat, inimitable.
Ella Skilbeck-Porter, These Are Different Waters
Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: 鈥業nflatable pool鈥�, and the substantial visual sequence, 鈥楥oncrete Pool鈥�. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, 鈥榓 stratosphere of shifting surfaces鈥�, resists closure and passes the baton: 鈥楾he end of my swim, the beginning of yours鈥�.
Emily Stewart, Running Time
A fine-tuned book-length assemblage of dispersed 鈥榗erebral offcuts鈥�, virtuosically inventing 鈥榯he shape of a mood鈥�. Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax. Condensed, sharp pops of resonant fragments create their own fresh textures and juxtapositions.
Details of the award ceremony on 12 November will be announced soon.