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Bonny Cassidy and Hasib Hourani shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Two Giramondo authors are shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Bonny Cassidy’s Monument is a finalist in the non-fiction category, with Hasib Hourani’s rock flight a finalist for poetry. Manisha Anjali’s debut collection Naag Mountain was also highly commended.
The shortlist was announced on 28 January, with the winners announced on 19 March.
Judges’ comments, Monument by Bonny Cassy
Their story isn’t mine, but I’m standing by it.’ Bonny Cassidy’s
Monumentis an audacious and complex act of historical recovery. It combines poetry, memoir and speculative historical narrative as the author reckons with her own family’s settler past and attempts to construct a white Australian remembering that is adjacent to First Nations’ experience. There is a precise richness in this remembering and reconstruction, set down with a poet’s ability to weigh each word and position them with care and attention.Monumentexamines an occluded, violent past and assembles a point of adjacent, lyrical witness.

Judges’ comments, rock flight by Hasib Hourani
Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a thrilling and original work, featuring a sophisticated exploration of the possibilities of language to deconstruct and reconstruct, to destroy and create. Drawing on diverse influences, Hourani renders not only the devastation of Israeli occupation on Palestinian people wherever they are now, but creates a new vocabulary for contemplating the past, and forging pathways of resistance into the future. rock flight is attentive to form and underpinned by lyric virtuosity that activates the reader to see and consider space and time in different ways. It shifts elegantly between intimacy and reportage, political analysis and the soft fragmentation of everyday life. This is a book that changes the poetic landscape and makes ground for genuine revolution.
