Congrats to long-time Overland contributor and editor of our recent spoken word edition Maxine Beneba Clarke for taking home the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript at last night’s launch of the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

A talented and prolific poet, fiction writer and essayist, Maxine won for her short story collection Foreign Soil, which ‘takes us from Footscray to Kingston via Villawood and London in tales of the dispossessed, the newly arrived, those seeking refuge and those realising they are in need of it’.

Congratulations again, Maxine!

Read more of Maxine’s work at Slam up.