Ashley Haywood Highly Commended in the 2024 Five Islands Prize
'Polyp provides a fresh reading experience and proposes a new ecology of how language works. The collection is playful in form and deeply serious in how it offers us pause to feel and see the world anew. Though minimal in length, this collection swells with deep echoes of resonance. The reading experience is akin to wandering through an art exhibition or immersion in music. It acts as an artful field guide as to how we might attend differently to the relationship between the human and more than human world.'
2024 FIVE ISLANDS PRIZE JUDGES' REPORT
One of Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2024
'Svetlana Sterlin’s début poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language, explores swimming – its rhythmic strokes and breathing – as spirited moments of liberation. The silence of being underwater is used to uncanny effect as Sterlin’s poems confront narratives of displacement and disappointment like a hard slap of water on the body.'
Cassandra Atherton
October 2024: Six New Titles
We're happy to announce the release of six new titles in October.
All six are now available to order.
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
'After Fukushima' by Ryoichi Wago shortlisted for the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Congratulations to Ayako Takahashi and Judy Halebsky who have been shortlisted for the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for their translation of Ryoichi Wago's Since Fukushima.
'To read Wago Ryoichi's Since Fukushima is to wake up in a hall of mirrors. Not the kind Bruce Lee enters in Enter the Dragon. In Halebsky & Takahashi’s astounding translation of Wago's world, the mirrors face the walls, while their opaque sides stare at you. And while in Bruce Lee's room you would be lost among your doppelgangers, in Wago's you will be alone. This is not to say he has wrought a language of nihilism. Quite the opposite. Wago's speaker, like a water diviner, locates hope in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. There is no greater achievement than this.'
Eric Hyett, Archana Madhavan, and Shriram Sivaramakrishnan
2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize Judges' comments
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
New Releases
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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