From a field of many hundreds and a remarkable shortlist of nine poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2021—Keri Glastonbury, Grace Yee and Toby Fitch—have selected these three poems as the winners

A is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; B is for Bargaining in Bad Faith; C is for Casualisation; D is for Dialectics; E is for Enterprise Agreement; F is for Funding—or lack thereof; G is for Gaslighting; H is for Human Resources; I is for Inflation; J is for Jim-jams; K is for Kafka ...

From a record number of entries, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2020—Bonny Cassidy, Bella Li, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, and Toby Fitch—selected these four poems as the winner.

In the first half of 2020, Overland received a small grant to help the magazine provide writing and publishing opportunities during the pandemic lockdown, part of a broader scheme by Creative Victoria to save the arts sector when so many jobs and gigs completely disappeared for so many artists. ‘Poetry in Lockdown’ is one outcome of this—

‘No Alarms’ could be said to have a strong tentativeness: in tending towards a prose poem, but not becoming one, in tending toward cutup, but resisting the difficulty of that for its own difficulty (of writing this good poem). ‘No Alarms’, despite its multi-directionality, finds clearings in the mind. Its strong sense of style helps, […]

Sean Bonney (1969-2019) died in November.  He was a British anti-fascist activist, revolutionary socialist and poet who was born in Brighton and raised in the north of England. He lived in London, and, from 2015 until his death, in Berlin. He was married to poet Frances Kruk. His last book of poems, Our Death, was […]

The three winning poems, as with those on our shortlist, are vastly different in their aesthetics, but what unites them is a shared ethics of seeing the world and its sociopolitical constructs anew, and a searching for patterns that might make sense of what’s impossible to resolve – our shared, though disparate, existence in the Anthropocene.

You have a new memory: Every practicing psychologist ever has that Japanese print of the Tsunami

All five poems on this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize shortlist – Jazz Money’s ‘as we attack’, Kirli Saunders’ ‘A dance of hands’, Laniyuk Garcon’s ‘Remember’, Raelee Lancaster’s ‘haunted house’ and Susie Anderson’s ‘revolve’ – are testimony to the diverse work of emerging Indigenous poets, not only in the Nakata Brophy Prize submissions, but more broadly across the country.

In the true style of Judith Wright, there soon emerged poems about the environmental gaze cast over land, heartfelt rebellions of courage, and history, as it is understood by individual rapture. As an Australian poet I felt pleasantly relieved and rewarded by the high poetic quality of submissions. At a glance it was obvious the strongest voice belonged to a much younger voice than mine – a delightful hope for the future of Australian poetry!

This is very resonant with fiction for me, and something I think many writers neglect to consider deeply: what shape is your story, and why is it made this way? I often reread Ursula Le Guin’s essay, ‘The carrier bag theory of fiction’, which talks about the issue of narrative form as a radical project – and the idea of using the story as a container for something.

My favourite living poet, a poet who seemed like he’d never stop writing, died in his sleep in his home in Hudson, New York, on Sunday 3rd of September, a strangely appropriate way to go, perhaps, for John Ashbery – unconscious, half in this world, half in another, kind of like his poems.

This year’s shortlisted poems experimented with modes, moods and discourses to engage with various political and cultural moments. These poems made us return again and again to uncover more within their meanings and structures; to interrogate their ideas, line by line. Each poem had its particular vitality, its seductions, its pull, its hook. We continued to challenge each other about those that stood out and our lists kept changing. Some poems took weeks to emerge from the group. Others faded.

Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers; first place awards a three-month writing residency at Trinity College, $5000 and publication in Overland. This year’s shortlist was very strong, with the top three poems closely matched. All three winners are available to read at overland.org.au.

But really, isn’t nurturing the penniless avant-garde something we should all embrace? If we sincerely believe in the great life of the imagination, the radiant promise of its daily emergence in literature, music, art, and film, and in deep reflection and complex thought – all those inalienable horizons to being truly human – then we should also step-up and protect the imagination from the many equally great forces that humanity casts against it daily.

From a drunken cruise on the harbour comes a bouncing melody: I wanna have sex on the beach. Anyone can