Established in 2007, The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for new and emerging poets is supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Entrants must have no more than one collection of poems published under their own name. This year, the major prize is $6000, and second and third prizes are $2000 and $1000 respectively. All three poets will be published in Overland.

We received nearly 700 entries from emerging poets from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. We’d like to thank all entrants for their imaginative work, and our team of incredible judges, Andy Jackson, Autumn Royal, Elena Gomez and Toby Fitch. They rose to the challenging task of reading and judging a diverse and exciting range of poems.

After careful consideration, the judges have selected eight outstanding poems to form this year’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize shortlist.

Congratulations to the following poets:

Andrew Brooks

‘Celestial Tree’

‘Celestial Tree’ is a poem about the grease of empire.

Andrew Brooks lives on unceded Wangal land where he is a lecturer in Media and Culture at UNSW, one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate (along with Astrid Lorange), a co-organiser of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network and a member of the publishing collective Rosa Press.

Dženana Vucic

‘Because a wind blazes’

‘Because a wind blazes’ is a poem about war, written with anger and defiance.

Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and critic living between Berlin and Naarm. Their writing has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Overland, Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Multilingual Writing Project and others. They’re currently working on a memoir about the Bosnian war and a poetry collection.

William Fox

‘Febrile’

‘Febrile’ is about seeing my little sister go into convulsion at a cricket game in 1991.  

William Fox is from Naarm / Melbourne. His work has appeared previously in places like Meanjin, Island, Overland, Cordite, and the Best Australian Poems series of books. His debut collection, Apollo Bay, was released by Rabbit in 2023. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from Melbourne University, and works in law.

Daley Rangi

‘The Mountain Remembers’

Volatile reveries on anthropophagy as justice.

Daley Rangi is a shapeshifter, a Te Ātiawa Māori artist at large. Joyfully unpredictable, they generate antidisciplinary works investigating injustice and speaking truth to power. They have published a collection of poetry and hauntings, titled Burnt Tongue.

Chloe Mayne

‘larapuna’

This poem is for my ancestral grandmothers, the saltwater women of lutruwita’s north-east. It is for the fire-boulders, who watch on, and the sound of all the footprints they hold. It is for menstrual blood as a messenger, and remembering a world before barbed wire.

Chloe Mayne is a pakana poet whose work twines threads of motherhood, decoloniality and ecology. She is currently writing a creative doctorate at the University of the Sunshine Coast, while living in an old beach shack near her hometown of nipaluna/Hobart.

Anita Solak

‘What’s my name’

‘What’s my name’ is a poem about the fluidity/duality of language and memory, the tripartite nature of my ethnicity and questions I’m still learning how to answer.

Anita Solak is a poet and editor living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land. She plays with electronic-literature and the failures of language. Her digi-lit, essays and poetry can be found in Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Runway Journal and The Suburban Review among others. She has been a poetry editor at Voiceworks and a 2023 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. 

Panda Wong

‘pork lullaby’

Written in the spiral of a pig’s tail, ‘pork lullaby’ is about meaty optimisation, kinship and being a soft creature in a hard world.

Panda Wong is a poet living on unceded Wurundjeri land. With a focus on friendship, her practice circles around the void. She has published one chapbook, angel wings dumpster fire (2022) and salmon cannon me into the abyss, a collaborative poetry EP. She also co-edited Best of Australian Poems 2023.

Brendon IJ Mcleod

‘split mind’

‘split mind’ is a poem which uses embedded clauses and disorganised sentence structure, a symptom of schizophrenia, as a structural device to discuss spiritual self-actualisation, diagnostic terminology, and psychiatric respect from the perspective of someone with a psychotic illness, while making an appeal to a more universal feeling.

Brendon IJ McLeod writes poetry, drama, and long and short prose fiction. He is a musician. He works in education. In 2023 he was awarded a residency from The Writers’ Space to Varuna The National Writers’ House in Katoomba. His work often discusses his lived experience of mental illness.

Congratulations again to the shortlisted poets. Final results will be announced at Overland soon!

The Judith Wright Poetry Prize is supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation