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Alexis Wright and Jennifer Maiden have been shortlisted for the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Congratulations to Alexis Wright for being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Nonfiction for her most recent book, Tracker, and to Jennifer Maiden for being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry for her collection, The Metronome.

Two further Giramondo titles were highly commended by the judges – they are No More Boats by Felicity Castagna and I Love Poetry by Michael Farrell.

To learn more about the award, visit the Wheeler Centre website.

Antigone Kefala has been shortlisted for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Awards

We congratulate Antigone Kefala for being shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with her poetry collection, Fragments.

Antigone Kefala’s Fragments is a searing enactment of memory. Time demolishes us all in little doses, so the poet contends, but the past is “a poison / we thirst for”. Shards of memory conjure the world in various states of evanescence: dreams evoke empty rooms in old houses, the floorboards gone, even the walls are thinning to mist – here and there the cry of birds pierce the enveloping silence.

We, like the poems, may “sink in light, disappear in silence”, but Kefala bids us to recall the “glossy beings” of our younger selves who head into the future innocent to what awaits us.

Kefala astounds with imagery that is intense, unsettling and always unexpected: at dusk in the coastal town of Derveni on the Peloponnese peninsula, fishing boats are “massive dark stones / planted / in a field of moonstone”. Light, fire and flowers are recurring motifs, as is the theme of “self-sufficiency”, which in the fierce austerity of Kefala’s mind finds its ultimate embodiment in death.

Fragments is a wonder of minimalism in which we find ourselves, like the poet, dancing in memory rooms growing bigger and bigger. It is a major work by a senior poet whose poetry continues to fascinate.

Judges’ comments

Antigone Kefala wins the 2017 Queensland Literary Award for Poetry

This year the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, given to an outstanding collection of poetry by an Australian writer, was awarded to Antigone Kefala for her poetry collection Fragments.

About the poet

Antigone Kefala has written four works of fiction, including The First JourneyThe Island and Summer Visit, and four poetry collections, The AlienThirsty WeatherEuropean Notebook and Absence: New and Selected Poems as well as the non-fiction work Sydney Journals. Born in Romania of Greek parents, she lived in Greece and New Zealand before coming to Australia.

About the book

Antigone Kefala is one of the finest Australian poets, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of her minimalism, and the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragmentsis her first collection of poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998. It follows her memoir Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008), of which one critic wrote, ‘Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it’. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, with its linguistic precision, its heightened perception and sense of drama – though the territory is often darker now, as the poet navigates the liminal spaces between life and death, and the energies which lie in wait there.

Learn more about the Queensland Literary Awards.

Giramondo publishes the first title in its new Southern Latitudes series, devoted to writers from the southern hemisphere

A note from Ivor Indyk, Giramondo Publisher

It is extraordinary how devoted we are to the north, when we take our literary bearings in Australia. Of course there is not a lot to the south of us in the way of literary precedents to follow, but to the east and west, in Southern Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and South America, there are rich literary traditions, a common historical background in colonisation, an awareness of the complex relationship between our Indigenous and migrant populations, and a shared experience of living in southern latitudes, under southern skies, to the rhythm of southern seasons. This argues for resemblances between the perspectives in our writing.

The spell and the disappointment of the north is explicit in the first title in the series, All My Goodbyes, where the young female narrator leaves Buenos Aires to spend much of her youth in Europe. This is a familiar trajectory, as is her return, not only to the city from which she started, but further south, to a farm in Patagonia. The traditionalism of the old world, ironically portrayed in the intellectual pretensions of her German lover, the sense of cultural superiority, and on the other hand, the combination in her of defiance and self-deprecation, persistence and restlessness, these qualities too appear in our writing. There is something else I admire in Dimópulos, and in Latin American writing, a formal skill in the framing of narrative and in the use of shorter fictional forms like the novella, the concentration and economy of which is conducive to intensity, thought and experimentation.

The aim of Giramondo’s ‘Southern Latitudes’ series is to bring together writers from the southern hemisphere, and to allow their work to strike resonances for Australian writers and readers. Forthcoming titles include the collection of essays Can You Tolerate This? by New Zealand writer Ashleigh Young, a recipient of the prestigious 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize; and the futurist novella Balada by Argentinian writer Marcelo Cohen, translated by Chris Andrews.

Ivor Indyk

Brian Castro to appear at the 2017 International Literature Festival in Berlin

Brian Castro, author of Shanghai Dancing and The Garden Book, will attend this year’s International Literature Festival being held in Berlin. Castro has been selected to attend the festival as part of the Literatures of the World program, which features world-renowned authors as well as new discoveries from the fields of prose and poetry.

Castro will discuss his latest work, Blindness and Rage, a verse novel in which a fatally ill poet finds himself in a secret society in Paris. Written in thirty-four cantos, Blindness and Rage recalls Virgil and Dante in its descent into the underworld of writing, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin with its mixture of wonder and melancholy. The short lines bring out the rhythmic qualities of Castro’s prose, enhance his playfulness and love of puns, his use of allusion and metaphor. Always an innovator, in Blindness and Rage he again throws down a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

For more information visit the International Literature Festival website.

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.

A note from Alan Wearne on These Things Are Real

Award-winning poet, Alan Wearne, writes here about his most recent poetry collection, These Things Are Real. The collection is available here.


Yes, poetry is an elitist pursuit, since not everyone can write it, nor can everyone read and enjoy it. Yet it is still the most democratic, maybe even anarchic of the written/spoken arts. Rarely beholden to any writers centre/book club/festival/market place, we truly can write as we please, and if readers have to meet us some of the way and adjust…so be it. They can be assured that these things I write of in the ‘Five Verse Narratives’ of my These Things are Real are indeed real: the damaged busker and the even more potent damage he causes; the reserved gay engineer and his assembly of warm-hearted friends; the love-lorn young lesbian Maoist; the acerbic 1950s widow and the dysfunctional couple she befriends; the well-educated junkie near-mesmerised by his dealer. Stories quite often out of a one- time Australia? Maybe, though still tales that I trust can resonate, for people will always love and nurture, hate and abuse, become obsessed, become addicted.

And if such are the constants what of the here-and-now? Well that’s where the satirist arrives, for if all eras need their satirical corrective, this era is bellowing out for such, in Australia and throughout the globe. Which I hope is where the ‘The Sarsaparilla Writers Centre’ of my present book comes barging in. Sure we can take shots at this brute in the Kremlin, that slob in the White House, those ditherers hovering about 10 Downing Street, but in a garden that has produced Abbott, Dutton, Hanson and Pell (for starters!) I think we should take to spraying our own weeds first. And those elitists, the poets, are just the folk for the job!

Alan Wearne


Alan Wearne’s poems coruscate with their brio. As they unfold, they mint the music and good cheer from resources as broad as the rhyming élan of Kipling, Newbolt or C.J. Dennis, to the street argot his extraordinarily ready ear might have overheard a moment ago. But always they communicate the enjoyment he takes in their composition, a poetry that delights as much in being at the up-front of how lives are lived and spoken, as it joys in how serviceable is the substance poetry itself to make that up-front vibrant and just.

Alan Gould

Michelle Cahill has won the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing

Congratulations to Michelle Cahill whose short story collection Letter to Pessoa won the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, a prize which recognises a published book of fiction written by an author who has not previously published a book-length work of narrative fiction or narrative non-fiction.

To learn more about the award and the other shortlisted works, visit the NSW State Library website.

The judges said:

This virtuosic literary collection experiments with a wide range of styles and narrative points of view. It wears its literary influences on its sleeve, adopting and adapting the narrative voices, characters, biographies and story fragments of writers as diverse as Pessoa, Derrida, Woolf, Borges and Genet. In ‘Letter to John Coetzee’ Melanie Isaacs, the minor character from Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, cheekily interrogates him about the ways in which women of colour are exploited and marginalised in literature as they are in life.

The stories address issues to do with race, war, queerness and belonging. Their characters move across geographic, class and aesthetic terrains, visiting global hotspots of struggle, tourism and migration. Questions are raised about the ethics of first-world witnessing as Cahill draws the UK, the US, India, Nepal, Southeast Asia and Australia together in a web of transnational connections.

From Tom Collins to Ern Malley to My Life as a Fake, the Australian literary world has had more than its share of authors unafraid to wield a satirical pen. Joining these ranks is Michelle Cahill’s wonderfully seditious collection of short stories, Letter to Pessoa. This spritely fictional debut addresses literature through some of its greatest practitioners — who may also be the most deserving of reproach. A teasing sense of imitation runs through this book, but it is more than mere caricature. The reader is left with nothing but admiration for Cahill’s incisive intelligence and literary skill in this original work.

This spritely fictional debut addresses literature through some of its greatest practitioners…The reader is left with nothing but admiration for Cahill’s incisive intelligence and literary skill in this original work.

Antigone Kefala and Michelle Cahill have been shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

We are thrilled to announce that two Giramondo authors have been shortlisted for 2017 NSW Premier’s Awards: Antigone Kefala is shortlisted for her poetry collection, Fragments, for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and Michelle Cahill is shortlisted for her short story collection, Letter to Pessoa, for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

To see the full list of shortlisted works, please visit the NSW State Library website.

Fragments: Judges’ comments

In Fragments, Antigone Kefala faces time’s relentless fragmentation of the wholeness of human experience. Against the indifference of the world to human life in all its phases — ‘so many seasons now/…unaware of us’ — Kefala cries out to poetry. In a book of stunning austerity, razor-sharp imagery and precise free-verse prosody, Kefala appeals to the redemptive power of memory in the face of life’s transience and intimate loss; a power that, for the poet, is found in the eloquence of poetry’s restoration of memory and life.

Kefala’s poetry approaches the dark clarity and dense allegory of Paul Celan, the face of the other peering into the face of the self across an abyss of emptiness which becomes, in the shadow of the poetic gesture, an abyss of completeness: ‘yet I called your name/lost in the rain of ash/that kept on falling.’ There is also passion, the sparkle of youth texturing the shadows of the present. Beneath it all is an eye for the ‘ferocity of life’ and, in poetry, its elegant embrace of what time can give, and what time takes away.

Letter to Pessoa: Judges’ comments

This virtuosic literary collection experiments with a wide range of styles and narrative points of view. It wears its literary influences on its sleeve, adopting and adapting the narrative voices, characters, biographies and story fragments of writers as diverse as Pessoa, Derrida, Woolf, Borges and Genet. In ‘Letter to John Coetzee’ Melanie Isaacs, the minor character from Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, cheekily interrogates him about the ways in which women of colour are exploited and marginalised in literature as they are in life.

The stories address issues to do with race, war, queerness and belonging. Their characters move across geographic, class and aesthetic terrains, visiting global hotspots of struggle, tourism and migration. Questions are raised about the ethics of first-world witnessing as Cahill draws the UK, the US, India, Nepal, Southeast Asia and Australia together in a web of transnational connections.

Ali Cobby Eckermann awarded 2017 Windham-Campbell prize

Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann has won the 2017 Windham-Campbell award for poetry. She has said that the prize money, which totals A$215,000, is ‘going to change my life completely’.

Of Eckermann, the Windham-Campbell Prize website states:

Through song and story, Ali Cobby Eckermann confronts the violent history of Australia’s Stolen Generations and gives language to unspoken lineages of trauma and loss. […] She has produced a substantial and formally innovative body of work, including the award-winning 2015 collection Inside My Mother. Eckermann has described Inside My Mother as an “emotional timeline” of the Stolen Generations, the thousands of children of indigenous descent—among them Eckermann herself, as well as her mother and son—taken from their families by the Australian government.

The award was started in 2013 by David Windham after the death of his lifelong partner Sandy Campbell in 1988. This year there were eight recipients.

To learn more about Inside My Mother and Ali Cobby Eckermann, visit the Giramondo website.

I was 34 when I finally found my mother. Four years later my son was returned to me (he was 18). My family taught us culture and I healed through poetry. An award of this magnitude will continue the healing for many of us.

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Sean Rabin’s Wood Green shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award

Giramondo author Sean Rabin has been shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction with his novel Wood Green set in a village on the slopes of Mt Wellington in Tasmania. Previously, the novel was shortlisted for The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. The novel is an exploration of the perils of literary ambition and the elusive prospect of artistic legacy.

Of this work, the judges said: Wood Green explores the relationship between art and life, and contains some illuminating passages about what it means to create art. Evoking the insularity of a small town life, it deals with its location and characters with warmth and humour. Suspense-fully plotted and cleverly narrated, Wood Green a book beyond categorisation – covering the domestic and the cosmopolitan, the pedestrian and the sublime, all with equal skill and authenticity.

To learn more about the shortlist, visit the Wheeler Centre website.

Lisa Gorton wins and Michael Farrell shortlisted for the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

We are delighted to announce that Lisa Gorton has co-won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Michael Farrell was also shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

You can listen to Lisa’s chat about her award-winning book with the Books and Arts Daily podcast.


Judges comments for The Life of Houses:

Lisa Gorton, in The Life of Houses, has written a highly original novel in which she has made the background of her narrative the foreground. She has taken a common place and made it mysterious and profound. Over a century ago the French novelist Gustave Flaubert said that he would like to write a book with no content, a book that was nothing but style. Lisa Gorton has gone some considerable way toward realising this essentially modernist ambition. She avoids all sensation, and the high points of her narrative all occur off stage, or are spoken of in the most low-key manner. These moments include a mother’s consideration of beginning an affair, a young girl’s failure to make a connection with a gay painter who is interested in her as a person, a ghost that never appears and the death of the girl’s grandfather. All these incidences, and others, typify what might be called the author’s contribution to the “a car went by” school of writing (walking to the beach one day it is noted that “a car went by” without any import or symbolism to this phrase).

While this is not a novel for every reader, those who enjoy observation will find it a book of exquisite precision. It is a work of realism taken to the point where that immemorial style is renewed for the modern reader. Some may remember the French novelist who caused a stir in the 1950s, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who concentrated on the physical objects informing his work. Like him, Lisa Gorton has written a book whose virtues are all in its details, but she has an unpretentious, clean and warm style which makes her remote from her similar predecessor.


Judges comments for Cocky’s Joy:

Michael Farrell’s Cocky’s Joy is a series of deliberate non-sequiturs, of phrases resonant yet unconnected to the words which have gone before, “slowly edging towards Babel in reverse”, as one poem puts it. “We see the world as a black and white golf course. Constellations like buttons on Apollinaire.” While such sentences, on the surface, make no sense, they are nonetheless suggestive of a particular mind at work. Many of the poems in this book are nothing more than lists of items that have been glimpsed in passing by that mind, or consciousness, and as such they help to create an inadvertent self-portrait of a person whose thoughts are endlessly curious, witty, literate, allusive, with a frame of references that range from the domestic to the cosmic, taking in both high culture and popular media on the way.

To see the full shortlists and other categories, visit the Department of Arts website.

Fiona Wright wins 2016 Queensland Literary Non-fiction Award

Fiona Wright has been awarded The University of Queensland Non-fiction Book Award for Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. Her collection of essays has also recently won the Kibble Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

Of Small Acts of Disappearance, the judges said: ‘This is a brilliant albeit disturbing collection of essays by Fiona Wright about her long association with an illness experienced by many young people in our land of plenty. She refers to her eating disorder as hunger, and in so doing she re-frames this mysterious illness so that we as readers are better able to understand it. She unsparingly highlights the contradictions and deceptions inherent in the illness, and what she sees as the empowering and addictive effects of hunger. She references anorexic moments in books we’ve all read and probably missed, sobering indeed.’

To read more about this collection of essays, visit the website.

Lucy Dougan wins the 2016 WA Premier’s Poetry Award

The Guardians by Lucy Dougan has won the Western Australia Premier’s Award in the poetry category. The award ceremony took place at the State Library of Western Australia on 3 October.

Of the poetry collection, the judges said: ‘Seemingly simple, actually very dense poetry, Dougan’s elliptical work hints at a life that hovers just beyond our comprehension; in dreams, tales, the past, in the imagination of the poet. This other world surrounds even the most domestic of the poems. Often funny as well as serious, the work is at the same time mysterious and haunting.’

Read more about The Guardians on the website.

Alexis Wright wins the 2016 Kate Challis Award for The Swan Book

Alexis Wright has won the 2016 Kate Challis Award with her novel, The Swan Book.

In their citation the judges noted: ‘Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book is a sprawling, magnificent achievement, a remarkable imaginative vision of Australia as it was and is, and will be. Set at some point in the future, in a world utterly changed by global warming, war and the global movement of people, it charts the life of a mute young woman, Oblivian Ethel(ene), beginning with her fraught relationship with an old, enigmatic refugee, Bella Donna of the Champions. The novel is full of mythologies and soaring imagery: the swans, for example, are ever-present and say so much about the predicament of the world they inhabit. At the same time, the novel launches a devastating critique of Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people: condemning the Federal government’s Intervention, and showing us the many ways in which a militarised colonialism has shaped, and continues to shape, Indigenous lives in Australia’s north and across the nation.’

In 1994, Emeritus Professor Bernard Smith (late) established “The Kate Challis Award” to honour the memory of his late wife, Kate Challis, who was known in her youth as Ruth Adeney (RAKA is an acronym for the Ruth Adeney Koori Award). In the Pintupi language RAKA means ‘five’ and in the Warlpiri RDAKA means ‘hand’. The donor stipulated that the award be made annually and is to be applied to encourage Indigenous artists to undertake literary works, paintings, sculptures, craftwork, plays and musical compositions and to assist in advancing the recognition of Indigenous achievements in these areas.

To read more about the award, visit the website.

Ali Cobby Eckermann shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s collection of poems, Inside My Mother, is one of three titles shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. The winner of the $20,000 award will be announced on 7 September, coinciding with Indigenous Literacy Day.

Of Inside My Mother, the judges said:

Inside my Mother is a haunting and evocative piece of writing from an extraordinarily gifted poet. Ali Cobby Eckermann has produced a deeply personal set of poetic moments, which are both inventive and classical. A raw and honest collection cut from bitter experience, Inside My Mother sometimes reads like a verse novel – except these moments might be ripped from the pages of another person’s life.

There is great empathy in these poems. The title suggests a primal longing for the mother, who is embodied in the birth trees that populate the country of the poet’s mind. Those birth trees, like the surreal dream birds, are both witness and sentinel to generations of mothers and daughters. There is nothing anaesthetic about these poems; they are brutal and affirming in their truth.

To read more about the shortlist, visit the Wheeler Centre website.