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 over 800 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, Shastra Deo, Harry Reid, and Andrew Sutherland. 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:  

Alex Creece

‘K*ll me, I’m an annoying girl/If I had a husband’ & ‘Inland Suburbia’

‘Inland Suburbia’

What if David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) was about a grotty suburban agoraphobe with time blindness on a decaying planet?

‘K*ll me, I’m an annoying girl / If I had a husband’

I am incredibly annoying and I wonder if men find me more killable for it. Despicable #MeToo. Also, fuck the state and fuck Big Tech.

Alex Creece is a writer, editor, collage artist and average kook living on Wadawurrung land. Alex is the Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review and an Online Editor at Archer Magazine, and her writing has been widely published. Alex is the author of Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth (Cordite Books, 2024), which was highly commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize.

Isabella G Mead

‘Lantern Ash Plot’ & ‘On the future distribution of fruit bats’

‘Lantern Ash Plot’

‘Lantern Ash Plot’ is about the violence inherent in the term ‘non-lethal parts’ (Australia exports such parts for the production of F-35 fight jets).

‘On the future distribution of fruit bats’

I am very fortunate to live near a large bat colony; ‘On the future distribution of fruit bats’ imagines a day when they depart for lutruwita’s cooler climes.

Isabella G Mead’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Infant Vine’, was published in 2024 by UWAP and shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection (2025). She lives, writes and raises her children on unceded Wurundjeri land.

Mia Thom

‘go raging’

‘go raging’ distills personal moments of reckoning with ongoing ontological homelessness perpetrated by colonial powers.

Mia Thom is a queer Bundjalung writer moving between Arakwal and Wurundjeri Country.

Edie Popper

‘Metaphysics: Toilet Block’

‘Metaphysics: Toilet Block’ follows a conversation I once had with an architect about the metaphysical value of toilet block design, and reflects on the cultural assumptions rooted in colonial domination beneath the Western paradigms of design that shape our implicit biases.

Jonno Revanche

‘Pig tail behind his blonde ear and running down the back’

It’s about walking past a tire yard in LA and having the thought that you understand love and belonging for a total of 5 seconds, before you forget about it and spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what that “thing” was again.

Jonno Revanche is a writer and poet originally from Adelaide, currently based in “the cross.”

Linda Judge

‘Cooking lessons’

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