Izzy Roberts-Orr's 'Raw Salt' WINS the 2024 Anne Elder Award
'Raw Salt impresses as a magnificent collection of lyric craft and poetic invention. Roberts-Orr traverses landscapes and griefscapes through poems that display a quiet and genuine confidence in lyric form. Every poem in Raw Salt achieves emotional realism and is maximally realised, offering arresting effects in imagery and aphoristic insight, and speaking in a coherent, distinctive and persuasive voice. Thoughtfully curated and finely concentrated, the poems bring about a change in feeling, moving from grief at family loss to an outlook on life that is wary of illusions. Raw Salt is an extraordinarily skilled and impressive debut. It is a joy to tread these expansive poems that reveal more depth with each reading.' 2024 Anne Elder Award Judges' report
Svetlana Sterlin's 'If Movement Was A Language' commended in the 2024 Anne Elder Award
'A highly individual work that depicts the life-world of the poet as swimming coach, whose intimate experiences of water, buoyancy, speed, fluidity and the locales of swimming pools become symbols of growing up between far-flung countries, societies and languages. Acting as a set of ‘theme and variations,’ the poems achieve a strong sense of character and of devoted attachment to the act and associations of swimming, achieving fresh effects and perspectives with each iteration, and evoking the confidence that arises from daring to test boundaries.' 2024 Anne Elder Award Judges' report
OPEN CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS: JULY 2025
We will be accepting manuscripts from all of Australia and Asia Pacific again from July 1-7, 2025 (closes midnight AEST).
We are looking for collections of short stories, essays, novellas, novels and poetry.
New Releases
Ashley Haywood Shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award
LK Holt wins the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry
Congratulations to Lucy Holt who has won the Queensland Literary Awards with her most recent collection Three Books.
'These are the work of a poet at the peak of her considerable technical abilities and imaginative range ... Holt transforms language into invocation, holding it by its stem.'
Judith Wright Calanthe Award Judges
WINNER OF THE 2024 NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS — KENNETH SLESSOR AWARD FOR POETRY
"With its beautiful pacing and intimate lyrical voice, Tais Rose Wae’s Riverbed Sky Songs draws us into its world of making and remaking, its sensuously crafted lines and graceful cadences braiding thought, emotion and image into poems that radiate wonder and beauty. Reading these poems, it feels like we are participating in their unfolding, in physical acts of weaving and shaping ideas and feelings into something real, something ‘to be held / with care, with custodianship’. It is a truly marvellous first book, its freshness of voice and vision promising restoration and renewal in its enchanting music and quiet, pristine beauty.
Riverbed Sky Songs opens with ‘Epilogue to Ceremony’, its first lines ‘We found an early dream of you / in the rockpool fringed with grass’ discovering a space for an exquisite conversation between unborn child and mother. From here a journey expands with the arrival of the child through vision to womb to encompass a poetic encounter with place and self over the first seasons of the child’s life. This intimate, delicate tracery of water and land, self, connection and solitude invites the reader to witness the intricate networks it maps. This is an intuitive, meticulously braided and integrated work of quiet, dauntless power, shaped by a quality of reverent attentiveness."
NSW Premier's Literary Awards Judges' comments
Award-winning Australian Poetry
Shortlisted and award-winning collections
Poetry
'This book is the business! Smart-mouthed, pussy-bowed. Pitch perfect filthy snippets of office lore and career advice.'
'The collection bursts with jokes, wordplay, curious facts, and striking thoughts expressed with the evident delight of an unexpected discovery. Its vibrant and brilliantly angular poems are full of surprising rhythmic effects, their tone by turns playful, arch, knowing and amused.'
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