Andy Jackson and Fiona Kelly McGregor shortlisted for Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Congratulations to Andy Jackson and Fiona Kelly McGregor, who have each been shortlisted for the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for their works Human Looking (Poetry) and Buried Not Dead (Non-fiction).

Of Jackson’s Human Looking the judges said:

Andy Jackson’s fifth collection is nothing short of textured. While fiercely anecdotal, conversational and crafted, Jackson’s art is consistent in its illumination of the discourse and lived experience in disability. These poems range in craft from his own childhood medical files, responses to pop culture and connective odes in erasure to literature’s greats. Deep and experienced, accessible and challenging, Human Looking casts honestly filtered light on our bodies. How we see them, respond to them and how we live within them, this collection is dimensional in its lyricism and form. An undeniably potent collection ‘tenderly sketched’ by its creator.

Judges’ report

The judges said of McGregor’s essay collection:

Buried Not Dead maps an alternative topography of Sydney, exhuming queer and artistic subcultures from the shiny metropolis’s margins. Blurring boundaries between profile, personal essay, arts criticism and reportage, these essays roam through the utopian possibilities of ’90s clubbing and techno; embodied portraits of unruly artists (gender-scrambling cabaret/burlesque/drag acts, poets, performance artists, tattooists, autotheorists before the genre had a name); elegies for the city subsumed by gentrification and over-policing. Fiona McGregor becomes cartographer of an ephemeral queer underground, thrumming with joy and creation and life. We were here, these vital essays insist, and the art we made mattered.

Judges’ report

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on Thursday 3 February 2022. Voting is now open for a People’s Choice Award.