KONTRA

Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry

In KONTRA, a collection by the multi-award-winning Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada, characters reckon with the constraints of the past in order to claim a future of their own making.

KONTRA enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between ‘feminine’ goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion. It casts a female gaze on the kontrabida – a Filipina soap opera villain stuck in a rise-and-fall cycle. The poet reimagines the kontrabida as a figure driven not by revenge, but by wild desire. Oscillating in and out of character, Andrada navigates the tension between poet and persona. Alongside the shapeshifting, spectral force of the kontrabida, the poet invokes a chorus of voices to trace a lineage of opposition and the alternate futures it holds.

The collection is in the form of a narrative triptych. The opening section ‘KONTRA’ explores the power and fate of the oppositional figure. In ‘OPERÁ’, two characters speak alongside each other to excise painful histories of domination and sexual assault; which moves us forward to the final section ‘BIDA’, to a more genuine, queer voice that is free from domination.

WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2026
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award 2026
SHORTLISTED: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2026
LONGLISTED: The Stella Prize 2026

A book of exceptional formal ambition and imaginative force, KONTRA enlarges the possibilities of the contemporary lyric… These are poems of haunting and transformation, alive to the violence and love we carry with us. Andrada’s formal inventiveness arises naturally from the emotional and intellectual pressures of her work. Conceptually sophisticated and emotionally immediate, KONTRA is a work of astonishing clarity and enduring resonance.
Judges’ comments, Queensland Literary Awards

An exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism… Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA is a testament to lyrical mastery.
Judges’ comments, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Unafraid of taking aesthetic risks, Andrada assembles her materials with acuity, precision and striking diction, enveloping her reader in a heady sensorium that is impressively formally controlled.
Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Few poets can unsettle the contours of desire and power like Eunice Andrada. KONTRA embodies a vivid poetics of opposition, intimacy, dissent and their infinite possibilities. Andrada is an unparalleled voice that continues to enchant and defy – as kontrabida, as lover, as poet. This is a work of ferocious beauty.
Manisha Anjali

Eunice Andrada’s searing KONTRA summons the full force of ‘pure form’ – beauty, eloquence, rage and mourning in equal measure – to tell ‘a story that does not end’ in the name of female justice.
Kate Lilley

KONTRA is Eunice Andrada’s most assured and impressive collection yet: an exquisitely composed contra-lexicon, a paean to defiance. This is a book of continual rupturing and suturing — of historical narratives, of the desired and desiring self, and of the lyric — speaking always from and with a chorus of others. Through poetic forms stunning in their precision, Andrada’s restless kontrabidas move against empire and extinction, navigating the treacherous edges between past and present, the painter and her subject, first and last names.
Bella Li

A masterstroke – a book that refuses, seduces, and cuts through the air like a voice that’s had enough of being polite… tender and furious in equal measure.
Neen Ramos, Booktober