Two Hundred Million Musketeers

Winner of the Anne Elder Award 2025

Shortlisted for three Australian literary awards, Ender Başkan’s debut collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in.

Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection depicts the intensity of life as a parent of young children. It maps the shifting trains of thought which go with the experience of being a new parent, when one’s attention is drawn in many different directions – between child-rearing and house-keeping, domestic crises, the need to earn a living, and the responsibilities you have to the past as well as to the future, to your own parents and grandparents, as well as to your children. Work, friendships, social life and creative practice are all altered. The poet reflects on his own childhood, and his grandparents’ exile from their homeland in Turkey, to which he returns several times in the course of the book, with his own young family. But there is also an increased awareness of the future, not only to the world his children will grow up in, but to the kind of world that is being built right now, in homes, workplaces, and in social and political allegiances.

Perhaps most tellingly, since Ender Başkan is a poet, he is subsumed in the flood of language, as it emerges from the mouths of his youngsters, indeed from his own mouth, as he talks to them. Words and sounds and the effects of language come to the fore. The imagination of children lends its own wonder and surrealism to that of the poet. His writing is direct, playful, absurd, staunch and political. In these respects, Başkan follows in the footsteps of the previous generation of Australia’s poets of migrant background, all of them masters of language – Pi.O., Chris Mann, Antigone Kefala and above all the late Ania Walwicz, his close friend and mentor.

WINNER: Anne Elder Award 2025
SHORTLISTED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2026
SHORTLISTED: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2026
SHORTLISTED: Mary Gilmore Award 2026
SHORTLISTED: ALS Gold Medal 2026

Başkan’s lines explode like fireworks – the collection holds the absurd rhythms, spontaneous expressions and joyous exclamations of the lived world. Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a radiant debut, outstanding in originality, experimentation and resonance.
Judges’ comments, Anne Elder Award

Timely and exquisitely crafted… This book is an invitation to play and to listen, to explore what might be possible if a line were to stretch between one person and another. In a world where there is much to be angry about, Two Hundred Million Musketeers greets despair with the full force of wonder and reciprocity. It is a book whose ‘bigness makes other people feel bigger’.
Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

A compelling debut which weaves the idiosyncrasies of the world into its pages… Başkan’s spirited stream-of-consciousness invites the reader into the family of this collection, by drawing from the imaginative language of children, the peculiarities of waged labour and the return to his ancestral home of Turkey. The lived world, with its clamour and complexity, spills out of the book in unexpected ways.
Judges’ comments, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Simultaneously congenial, “hope-adjacent”, irreverent and discerning… an associative lucidity grounds this collection, yet each idea electrifies the next… the miracle of Two Hundred Million Musketeers is its unwavering rebuke of cynicism.
j. taylor bell, The Saturday Paper

His main point is that poetry can and should be fun. And Başkan works to make this come true in every poem. He does it with generosity, flair, and buoyancy that connect his poetry to a very Melbourne milieu, to language (and languages), to the chaotic details of a life lived, and to the reader… There is the rhetorical feel of performance as each poem unfolds and surprisingly this lends a sustained fizz and liveliness rarely encountered across a collection that runs well over a hundred pages. Başkan…is an assured voice, and one that I hope we will keep hearing for years and books to come.
Kevin Brophy, Australian Book Review

Ender Başkan is on a roll: behold the flows of this supercollider brain and heart, imparting particles (poetic lines) with immense energy, accelerating language into an extreme and vast sequence of intimacy – the vastness of work life, art life, and life life, and life, and life, held high.
Lucy Van