Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · Uncategorized Nakata Brophy Prize: Judges’ notes Jeanine Leane and Toby Fitch 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. Congratulations to the shortlist and the three following poets. Runner-up ‘A Dance of Hands’, by Kirli Saunders, is a sensorial retrospective love poem best read out loud. The other runner-up, Susie Anderson’s ‘revolve’, is a subtly evolving prose poem about the moon and the speaker coming-to-terms with events. This year’s first-placed poem, Raelee Lancaster’s ‘haunted house’, whose speaker reworks an old trope unflinchingly in the face of scepticism, was a clear winner. Its organically formed structure across three parts allows it to express multiple traumas experienced and inherited by Australian Indigenous peoples, individual and collective. This prize is sponsored by Trinity College, University of Melbourne. Read the rest of Overland 231 If you appreciate Overland’s support of new writers, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Jeanine Leane Jeanine Leane belongs to the Wiradjuri people from the Murrumbidgee river. She is a poet, teacher, author and essayist who is well published in the areas of Aboriginal writing, writing difference and literary criticism. More by Jeanine Leane › Toby Fitch Toby Fitch is Overland’s poetry editor, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and the poet behind Rawshock, Bloomin’ Notions, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before and, most recently, Sydney Spleen. He is the editor of the poetry anthologies Best of Australian Poems 2021 (co-edited with Ellen van Neerven) and Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New & Emerging Poets 2007–2020. More by Toby Fitch › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 18 November 2024 · Art Art and ethics in death: the case of Vivian Maier Maks Sipowicz In the internet age we have the means to make Vivan Maier's photographs and materials available to everyone, preserved and displayed, away from the necromantic urges of capital accumulation at the expense of a dead artist. 12 November 202414 November 2024 · open letter End scholasticide in Palestine: an open statement Stop Scholasticide AU We, the undersigned who represent the diverse education community across the continent of Australia, demand an end to the complicity of the Australian education sector’s leaders in the systematic destruction and attempted annihilation of the Palestinian education system.
