Aden Rolfe wins the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award

Congratulations to Aden Rolfe who has won this year’s Mary Gilmore Award, a prize given to the best first book of poetry published in the previous year.

About the poet

Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor whose practice includes poetry, performance writing and criticism. His poems have been published in the Age, Best Australian Poems, Overland and Best Australian Poetry, and broadcast on ABC Radio National (Books and Arts Daily) and 2SER (Final Draft).

About the book

False Nostalgia has received support from the Australia Council in the form of a JUMP mentorship, and from Varuna through the award of the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry. False Nostalgia explores the interaction of memory, identity and narrative – in particular, the relationship between what we remember and the stories we tell about ourselves. Through stand alone poems, intricate sequences and experimental poetics, False Nostalgia considers the disconnect between experience and recollection, the drive to document a moment, the fear of forgetting and the unreliability of memory. Rolfe approaches his subjects obliquely, evoking feelings of connection, loss and the experience of never quite grasping your own understanding of things. The poems place the reader in half-remembered places – beach shacks from past holidays, quivering forests, auction houses of the mind – asking not only what it means to look back fondly on a second-rate experience, but what it means to look forward to looking back on a moment while you’re still living through it.

Learn more about the Mary Gilmore Award.