π.O. (Pi.O) wins 2024 Patrick White Literary Award

Legendary Melbourne poet π.O. has won the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award, receiving $20,000 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Australian literature. The announcement was made on 25 October by the award’s trustee, Perpetual.

The Patrick White Literary Award was established by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White to advance Australian literature ‘by encouraging the writing of novels, short stories, poetry and plays for publication or performance’. It is awarded to an author who has made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition.

Born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy, π.O. is a chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, and a highly disciplined anarchist who has worked as a draughtsman for forty years to support his art. His two most recent books are HEIDE (2019) and The Tour (2023). He is a finalist for the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature.

π.O. will be officially honoured at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Readings State Library Victoria on Wednesday 13 November from 6pm. Members of the public are welcome to attend, and can RSVP by emailing philanthropy@perpetual.com.au.

The 2024 judging panel comprised Ms Michelle de Kretser (Chair), Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy and Dr Sarah Holland-Batt. Read their citation below.

 
π.O. is a poet, publisher and literary editor from Melbourne who was born in Greece in 1951. In 1954 his family immigrated to Australia, where they settled in Fitzroy. For the past forty years, π.o. has worked as a draughtsman to support his creative practice, which is informed by his working-class, non-Anglo background and his anarchist politics.

Fitzroy brothel, π.O.’s first collection of poems, was published in 1974. Since then π.O. has published twelve books of poetry, including Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems (2008). He edited 925 and Unusual Work, magazines focusing on experimental literature, as well as Off The Road, an anthology of performance poetry (1985). π.O. is also a publisher at Collective Effort press.

A pioneering practitioner of spoken word and performance poetry in Australia, π.o. campaigned for its acceptance as a valid poetic form. On the page, his poems continue to display a lively and witty interest in spoken language: migrant idioms, working-class speech and Australian colloquialisms jostle and unsettle standard English in his work. Similarly, an encyclopaedic range of sources – proverbs, science writing, historical documents, classical mythology and children’s games to name a few – provide disparate linguistic elements that are juxtaposed in his poems to brilliant effect. The range and diversity of his registers remind us that π.O. is always, and foremost, an intensely political writer. 

Along with its deployment of the vernacular, π.O.’s poetry is characterised by the idiosyncratic use of punctuation and spelling. His concrete poems employ numbers, punctuation marks and other typographical devices in visually striking ways; see, for instance, Missing Form: Concrete, visual and experimental poems (1981). According to Andy Jackson, writing in The Saturday Paper, π.O.’s ‘invigorating use of punctuation and phonetic spelling reminds us that language is always vocal, accented and political’.  In short, π.O. has always favoured a radical and experimental poetics, which for many years went unrecognised by mainstream Australian literature.

24 hours: The day the language stood still (1996) is the first volume in π.O.’s ‘epic’ trilogy. It was followed by Fitzroy: The Biography (2015) and Heide (2019). In Fishing for Lightning, Sarah Holland-Batt suggests that these works function, in fact, as anti-epics, as the poet chooses nonlinear histories and an array of characters over the epic’s linearity and heroic single protagonist. Yet π.O.’s poems retain the sweep and scale of the epic, moving fluently backwards and forwards in time to uncover and scrutinise the echoes between present and past. Together, these three monumental volumes are consummate mappings of cities and their denizens: they seek to replicate the metropolis’s kaleidoscopic and anarchic nature at the level of concept, language and line. 

The Tour (2023), π.O.’s most recent book, chronicles the tensions within a group of Australian poets touring North America in the mid-1980s. Lucy Van, reviewing it for the Sydney Review of Books, calls it ‘the achievement of π.o.’s life [because] it actively bears the burden of the orders and disorders of our national poetry’.

In recent years, prize juries have recognised π.o.’s significant contribution to Australian literature with awards and nominations. Heide won the 2020 Judith Wright Calanthe Prize in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and was shortlisted in the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, while The Tour was longlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal. In addition, π.O. was a finalist for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature; he is currently a finalist for the same prize. It would seem that Australia is finally catching up with π.O.

When considering π.O.’s body of work, the judges of the Patrick White Literary Award were particularly impressed by his unflinching commitment to an experimental poetics and engagement with place, along with the wit and energy of his work. They noted that at every stage of his career, π.O. has defied literary norms, forging a distinctive, idiosyncratic and profound contribution to Australian literature, expanding its boundaries and possibilities for all who follow him.

The judges congratulate π.O. on the award.