Eunice Andrada and Ender Başkan have been shortlisted for the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, is shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Başkan is shortlisted for his debut collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers, which won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal.

Read the judges’ comments below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

Eunice Andrada’s powerful third collection, KONTRA, takes us into the tropical gothic world of female saints, the telenovela kontrabida, actresses, beauty queens and divas: a reliquary devoted to ‘what women know’ and the force of colonial allegories of sexual destiny and vengeance. 

A poetic exploration of ekphrasis, the representation of representation, structures the volume’s intermediation of female scenes, typologies, scripts and genealogies across different times and places in fulfilment of its guiding axiom: ‘The truth of the lyric moment / is in the execution / of the lyric moment’. 

The doubleness of ‘execution’ – severance and deadly technique – underwrites KONTRA’s reckoning with desire, fate and eloquence. The stakes are high in this gripping poetic melodrama. 

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: ‘Close this book to join the girl wound / to the woman wound. Open these pages / to split the wounds apart.’

KONTRA moves skilfully between realist and symbolic registers, wielding the language of historic judgement, disobedience and vengeance in the name of righteous love: ‘Unveiled and unclouded / may my wrongs create’. 

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan

Ender Başkan’s Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a timely and exquisitely crafted exploration of the arcs of love, joy and communion that guide us through our everyday lives, despite the precarities of the modern world. 

These poems reveal a curiosity about the complexities of our many and varied human relationships: with family, friends, neighbours, communities, colleagues, new acquaintances and strangers. Yet at the centre of this brilliant debut is love and care for two very young children who appear and reappear throughout the poems, fortifying a collection that chatters and hums with the wonder of new language. 

These are big-hearted poems that pull us close to the ‘I’ to witness the motions, mundanities and marvels of daily living, from navigating domestic responsibilities to enduring the repetitiveness of paid work, negotiating difficult neighbours to visiting his grandparents’ homeland with his young children. 

Cognisant of the creeping ruins of a world stultified by corporate greed and injustice, Başkan’s lines nevertheless gambol across observation, documentation and reflection with an expansive tongue, as if to set in motion a truly activist poetics, one that builds towards another possible, big-hearted world. 

As he writes, ‘how do we imagine other worlds if we only speak commodity?’ Indeed, taking cues from his children’s curious tongues, Başkan’s poems stretch through play with word, line and language, as if attempting to build a lexicon derived from origins of intimacy rather than ownership. 

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’.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory by Yumna Kassab (Giramondo Publishing, 2026). The book is Kassab’s first work of non-fiction since being named the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature.

It is an assumption of this writer that most people are familiar with the structure of a dictionary. Words are arranged alphabetically and if we do a Venn diagram comparing a dictionary and an encyclopaedia, there will be overlap.

It was my idea that a dictionary could tell the story of a person (me) in connection with a place (Parramatta) with enough flexibility to take in detours, digressions, musings and general quirkiness. I knew at the outset that the entries would be placed under titles and it would be fragmentary in spirit.

While a dictionary is known for its technical and functional parameters, it has been used creatively. For those interested in creative versions, there’s The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, which is not alphabetical at all, and then Léxico de Afinidades by Ida Vitale which I picked up on a 2022 trip to Uruguay and has just appeared in translation by Sean Manning.

Compendium. Lexicon. Encyclopaedia. Dictionary.

My efforts with Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory are too modest for it to be called an encyclopaedia. I am of the generation that knew the multi-volume encyclopaedia sets that some people had in their homes. I like the concept of a lexicon or compendium which need not be alphabetical, but my intention was to arrange A to Z so a dictionary it was going to be.

As for the presentation of this project. It consists of the full alphabet in this printed book and there is also a selection of letters (C, S, T, W, M, N, O, P) available on the Sydney Review of Books website so that a reading can be experienced a fragment at a time.

Lastly, all writing problems involve the dilemma of deciding when a project is done. I wrote from 1 December 2023 to 1 October 2024. Since then I have thought to add to this dictionary but I have drawn an arbitrary line, and in both a digital and physical form, the dictionary has been sent out to find its destiny in the world.

Andy Jackson reflects on Askew (October 2026), his first poetry collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Following his exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Askew widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues.

These poems arrived gradually out of a range of things I noticed and experienced over the last five years. The way people looked at you when you wore a face mask, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic first arrived. How the Goldfields, Dja Dja Wurrung country, where I live, can seem both devastated and strong. The sudden, unexpected death of a dear friend. How increasingly hard it seemed for people to listen to perspectives and griefs other than their own, especially online. The arrival in my body of various mysterious health issues. The bushfires that came within a few miles of our house.

At some point, it began to dawn on me that all these poems had fatigue in their bones. My fatigue, from the genetic condition I have, and the chronic illness I’ve been recently diagnosed with, is a fundamental constraint not only on my energy, but my creativity and being. 

Yet part of this exhaustion, this feeling not-quite-right, is also shared, is political and existential. None of us can entirely ignore the ongoing ecological crises, wars and conflicts, violences both intimate and global. This too feels chronic, an elegy unfurling into the future. No wonder writing often felt beyond my capacity. 

Yet, even before I was conscious of it, I sensed that constraint might hold some quiet, unexpected potential. Fatigue had me burrowing deep to find some well of rest and persistence, as well as burrowing outward to find community and a measure of groundedness.

I’m fortunate to have the benefit of an array of trusted collaborators, friends and colleagues, and a loving partner. In their creative essaying, I found rungs to climb, energies to be energised by. I wrote ekphrastically, in conversation and collaboration, and in response to poets whose writing embodies new ways of being masculine, of being human and sensitive. 

I also wrote many of these poems under formal constraint, using pre-existing poetic forms but also inventing new forms, such as the aftersongs, where the final word of each line is sourced from albums by musicians and composers who had died in the last five years. All these constraints dredged up movements and motifs I didn’t expect.

With all this in mind, many of these poems test out what it might mean to say ‘you’ or ‘we’ in a poem, instead of just ‘I’. The collection is also ordered so that each poem includes a word from the poem before it, a kind of ecological stitching.

That’s not to say Askew is entirely orderly. There are threads here that don’t obviously connect, that are frayed. The fabric, after all, is off-kilter. 

Andy Jackson
3 July 2026

Acclaimed Australian author Max Easton reflects on Now, Autonomy (1 Aug 2026), his third novel set in Sydney between the mid-nineties and now, following The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estate. The book expands Easton’s project, unique in Australian fiction, of documenting the dramatically changing modes of contemporary life through the lens of underground scenes and subcultures.

This novel has been built, demolished, reconstructed and sanded back so many times that in sitting down to write this author note, I can barely remember which version made it to print. It reminds me of a time when, after breaking a small bone in my wrist, a surgeon told me: ‘you can’t smash toffee, sticky tape it together and make it taste any good.’ But I would disagree. Anything tastes good if you want it bad enough, and I don’t think I’ve ever written anything with as much desire for finding toffee among the sellotape than I did with Now, Autonomy. 

I went through a lot of experiments to get to the heart of what I was looking for with this. I haggled with commercial real estate agents, released anonymously authored punk recordings made with friends, broke into condemned buildings to write among the asbestos fibres and pigeon shit. I’m not sure if that shows on the page, but it feels to me like the most embodied thing I’ve ever worked on. Its characters’ motivations, failures and vain attempts were often very close to my own or the people around me. Whether that’s fiction leading reality or the other way around is unclear to me, but maybe that was the point: to blur the boundaries between the page and the real world, without ever losing grip on the fact that this is still, very much, a novel.

I had two overarching passions that drove the writing of this book. One was the shape of Sydney, my home city that continuously suffers at the whims of developers, technocratic state planners and the interests of the investor class. The other was the shape of my generation, us millennials that bemoan the city and cultural milieu we’ve been handed without realising we’re not providing much more to those who come after us. There’s a cross-generational solidarity to Now, Autonomy, an ode to people who have tried and are trying to make good of a place like Sydney, especially for those who can’t meet the cost of living. It was an exercise in writing to the now from the depths of various archives, and in trying to provide something to a reader who sees little of interest in the glossy displays of the local book shop. 

On the note of this being the third book in a trilogy of Sydney novels: none of these need to be read in order, nor as a trio, but it’s interesting to me to see these stories and themes and characters sprawl across the novels and beyond, to journals, zines and guerilla publications for whoever eventually finds them. 

With thanks to all who worked on this book and whoever finds time to read it. 

Just two days after Lee Lai took home the Stella Prize, the author was declared a Best Young Australian Novelist for Cannon. As with the Stella, it was the first time in the award’s history that a graphic novel has been recognised.

Now in it’s thirtieth year, the prize – which is run by the Sydney Morning Herald – is given annually to Australian fiction writers aged 35 and under.

The judges described the work as ‘universal and quietly brilliant’, praising Lai’s ‘intimate story about the building pressures of family, work and relationships,’ where her ‘fine line drawings carry narrative, emotions and silence, perfectly complementing the spare text.’

In her interview with the paper, Lai says, ‘In Cannon, I wanted to write about the intensity, indispensability and dysfunctional intimacy of long-term queer friendships. Queers are so often looking to create family with one another, and succeeding and failing in beautiful and agonising ways (myself included). I’m hungry to see more stories that explore the queer platonic connections: the ones that are sometimes capable of breaking one’s heart even more profoundly.’

She adds: ‘I find it amusing when people tell me, “I’m just not sure how to read graphic novels”, and I want to tell them, “honey, it’s just top to bottom, left to right”. Best not to overthink it… Last year Michelle de Kretser, in reference to her experimental novel Theory and Practice said that “it’s good to expand the notion of what a novel can be”. I agree.’

Lee Lai will appearing with her fellow prize-winners at the Sydney Morning Festival.

Read three excerpts from Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle (April 2026), a collection of prose poems which explore the relationship between thinking patterns and ill health. Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is published alongside a new edition of Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s acclaimed 2014 debut, Autobiography of a Marguerite.

Excerpt: p.2

A baby is left out in the open, for instance on a suburban park bench. Which is the same as the man writing an essay next to a closet of empty clothes or a closet empty of clothes. Nothing rises or conflicts, there’s simply a set of questions set to music. They will always show what is required. Though with a different setting it would be unrecognisable. A beautiful, hurt mouth. Close to midnight. At the same time, one cannot feel another person’s pain, but only infer it from their behaviour and their reports of it. The background was in the backyard but I’ve always struggled with beginnings. The man I was talking to was small and far away. Coincidence is stitched into goals. A few frames later, wheels fall off to create drama. A rendering of things which open with discrepancy and close with similarity. What’s wrong with this picture.

Excerpt: p.13

To pass the time, to give it structure, she says, ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ A group of chairs structured around a bruise, even plus even is even, odd plus odd is even. Even though we do not mean to, we continue to feed the fish in the bruised pond. The outcome is predictable. I pick up the model chair with my model hand. Odd plus odd. Why don’t you, yes but. That’s the way it is, or that’s the way I am. What do you say after you say hello. My misfortunes are better than yours.

Excerpt: p.38

Once, through a tree-lined glance, symptoms were mistaken for cause. She is tired and tires. Absorb shock while keeping the wheel in close contact with the ground. A moment needs to be applied, but when I am, then I will. Yet action should happen first. The house had more eyes than windows. One misses relevant information if it is not phrased exactly the way one expects. The leaves were a reference to childhood. It’s beginning to get dark. I had left out something important, which I now realised I ought to have mentioned at the beginning. Wheels fall off to create drama. I coughed up a tree. Things like that were just details between me and him. Bearings are used to help reduce fiction at the interface. I had stopped reading novels. The answer depends on the assumptions.

The following is an excerpt from Ruins Child by Giada Scodellaro (1 Mar 2026), the 2024 winner of The Novel Prize. Set in what may be the future, Ruins, Child centres on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower.

We’re sitting on the living room carpet watching the 168 hours of footage. The schools are closed up for the Holiday. The footsteps of the children are heavy, running wild. We’re watching the part of the film when the woman is running errands and the like. Our community mostly walks, and there was a time when this woman walked about: back from the market, to the gardens, barefoot from the lake, on the community center table, to the bridge, in the mud, dragging her soles (dirty) around the house – though now she is bedridden. Confined to bed, riding the bed.

We sit up in her house and watch her go still. We watch the footage, and watch her lead the others through the streets. It doesn’t seem right how much the woman walks in the film, the ease of movement, arms swinging, not unlike a piece of metal, the metal metal, metal of waiting, the neighbor Dionne Brand says, or how often the woman remains on her feet.

She’s carrying a purse on her shoulder, a faux-leather, black. Her purchases bagged up by a teen. She carries loads of mustard greens, prune juice, ginger ale, vaseline, butter beans.

And they shadow her. They gather around her, this elusive figure, don’t she move quick? The six of them scale her. They move in unison. Do you know about that? About moving as a unit? It’s harmonious. Here come the six, they used to say, the six mix, here they are: the six fix, six peas in a pod, the six horsemen, the six kings-men, the neighbours would say. Here they come.

And when the woman drops down to tie a shoe they wait for her to finish. And the audience waits, in the living room the children quiet down their games. They check their own little shoes to see if they need tending.

Her thigh is out of place and shiny with oils. She’s gotten the necessary things – the turkey neck, the cowpeas, white vinegar.

The volume is raised up too high, It must be explained, the woman says, yells, profile to the camera, thighs sticking, strawberry skin, razor bumps showing, the mini skirt, climbing, tattoo peeking, walking slow, and all of them walking side by side – it must be explained how the Hill is raised but almost flat, not at all hilly, she says, mouth wide, and it sits on a salt marsh that is known to be sinking. Named after a certain somebody, a politician or something, a something something Hill, the woman says. Do you know about this place?

The group speeds up their walking to keep time with her. Yes, one of them says. Perhaps it was an Augustus Troy Hill or a Jamaal Amenite Hill, we don’t really know.

The woman is beginning to forget, to misplace things, and the others, the six, they let her tell them again, again, A something something Hill, though they know this speech. On her feet: tennis shoes.

The valley is familiar, it is the same now as it was then, during the taping, and before. So we’ve known it and the surrounding flatness for many years, decades. It is sinking a little, but then everything is going down, so today we tell ourselves it is fine, and just the same there is the Holiday, or there is an urge to preserve something. This film, it’s about place, community, she says, being rooted in the Hill, the way we are rooted, okay, and it’s about our Holiday or about tradition, and your place here – you.

Okay, they say. Okay, okay.

The group never uses the word unless there is something silly going on. To sit in the grasses, to talk to the neighbours, to excavate, the woman tells the six. Okay, they repeat. They walk on. They walk behind the gigantic head of this woman, this too tall woman. And get my good side, she says. She towers over them like a pine. 

There are hills in the distance, and the fog is down low. The camera captures this. Her pace does not give her age away. The woman is old, and she is with child.

Giramondo is proud to be a participating publisher in the Open Book: Australian Publishing Internship in 2026. Applications are now open.

The internship aims to provide a well-rounded introduction to the Australian publishing industry, and create practical and sustainable pathways towards long-term careers for aspiring professionals. 

Over the course of the program, interns will gain in-house experience at Australian publishing organisations from across the commercial, independent, and education sectors.

Throughout the program, interns will be supported by a mentor, who will act as an external contact to guide and support them through their internship.

The role is part-time over 21 weeks from May to October, with the first half of this placement at Giramondo’s offices in Parramatta, NSW.

Applications for the 2026 Open Book program close at 5pm AEST on Monday 23 March 2026.

Learn more about the position and how to apply here.

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka land, at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in south-east Queensland in 1957. An internationally renowned Mununjali poet, he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, after the death of his brother Daniel Yock, as a leading figure in protests against Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. His poetry collections date from the early 1980s; Harvest Lingo, his fourteenth collection, was published by Giramondo in 2022. It won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Prime MInister’s Poetry Award, and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2025 Lionel received the prestigious Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died on 12 February 2026, at the age of 68.

At the time of his passing Lionel was working on his latest collection, Warrior with a Fighting Stick. He was that warrior, and in his poetry and painting, language was his fighting stick.

Here are two powerful poems from his most recent collection Harvest Lingo.

A First Note About the Regions

I opened the door that
Morning to the horror of society
Sis we got to pay another 250
To get our brother’s coffin to the church
We already given all we got

Intruder Wants the Writer

To write as a child to be a man
No boxes of childhood voice
my present, writing details.
No hidden child backward growing up
gains my learned on the road sky.
Future’s song dance lit pen friends for me in evenings
Not one sort of personal fireworks voice,
gave rise to the now existence dared.
Reluctance response by these ages,
Spare me not remorseful teenage pandemonium.
Pare her tempest defiant with red yellow brown ochre.
Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided.
No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death. Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped
by swine trample readership.
Embellishing more than needed.

Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce the inaugural winner of the Poetry in Translation Prize is Osdany Morales’ Security Questions, translated from the Spanish by Harry Bauld. The Poetry in Translation Prize is a new biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. Security Questions was selected from a shortlist of eight, with 259 submissions overall.

The winners receive an advance of US$5,000, to be shared equally between poet and translator, followed by simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand with Giramondo, in North America with New Directions and in the UK and Ireland with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Publication is scheduled for early 2027.

Security Questions (El pasado es un pueblo solitario; Bokeh, 2015) uses the security questions that Morales was asked on his arrival in the US as way into his experiences as an immigrant. Harry Bauld and Osdany Morales first met while working at the same school. Bauld’s curiosity was piqued by the new hire, a Spanish-speaking novelist and poet, and he found his poems online. In his words, ‘they spoke to me, I did a translation of one, and by way of introduction and welcome sent it to him. He paid me the compliment of saying how strange it was to “hear my own voice in English.”’ Harry Bauld goes onto explain that, ‘[t]he poems from Security Questions are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime, and on the other a testament of exile and immigration, traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a problematic homeland for the uncertainties of the present. The English “prompt” titles are the security questions required to establish an online identity which the newly arrived Morales only half-understood and, indeed, given Morales’ characteristically unflinching irony, questions which open trenchant implications for the poet’s new “American” persona.’

‘Before arriving in the US, I had written only fiction. If it weren’t for this book, it would have taken me much longer to reach the lands of memory,’ Morales says. ‘At the time, I believed that fiction wasn’t confessional, that only poets had access to that kind of meaning. It was through writing poetry that I realised I carried many memories in literary form – that exile had established a past I could already recount without waiting for old age. Exile and poetry made me look not exactly backward, but inward.’

Harry Bauld says, ‘Frost famously said poetry is what’s lost in translation, but in my experience, poetry is also, to borrow from William Carlos Williams, “what is found there.” Always there are the contrary weights and measures of the source traditions and those of what is often called (horribly) the “target” language; the translator, working toward something like equivalency, labours in those “between” spaces. Our memories of reading and admiring literature published by Fitzcarraldo, Giramondo and New Directions make us doubly proud to be the inaugural translation prize collection to appear in their catalogue.’

Rachael Allen, the poetry editor at Fitzcarraldo Editions, says of the winning collection, ‘We, the judges, kept returning to these poems over the course of the reading period, and were struck continually with their newness, their humour, their prescience and their timelessness. The style of these poems feel unique and irreverent, shocking and moving. They have stuck with us from the moment we first read them, and they feel, sadly, stunningly pertinent. The poems are a necessary documentation of the context of a specific time and place, while also transcending their specifics as a reminder of the absurd semiotic brutality of all borders.’

Nick Tapper from Giramondo added, ‘Osdany Morales’s brilliant, urgent Security Questions, translated by Harry Bauld with intensity and clarity, is an outstanding winner of the first Poetry in Translation Prize. The qualities of the collection – its intricate weaving of memory and experience, heightened by the absurdities of exile, and underpinned by the poems’ unmistakeable, syncopated, pulsing rhythms – were evident from first reading. Its publication in English will be an important event. At Giramondo we are delighted to continue our collaboration – following on from the Novel Prize – with Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions, and to publish such essential international writing.’

Jeffrey Yang concluded, ‘New Directions is honoured to be a part of the first biennial poetry translation prize with our publishing friends Fitzcarraldo and Giramondo. Harry Bauld’s brilliant translation of Cuban writer Osdany Morales’ Security Questions speaks deeply to our embattled times while elevating our hearts and minds with humour and compassion.’

Giada Scodellaro reflects on her debut novel Ruins, Child (Giramondo, 2026), winner of the 2024 winner Novel Prize. The book is set in what may be the future, and centres on six women sharing space in a crumbling apartment tower. It was described by Katie Kitamura as ‘a visionary novel…[that] refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience.’

It is an interesting thing, to revisit a work and consider its origin. Ruins, Child, then, is a work gathered/rooted in landscape – the salt marsh of the Hutchinson River. That is to say, I write first toward stillness. Always public and domestic spaces, collective movement, and a granular examination of proximity and discomfort. The unfolding leg as an opportunity to recount, to mark the slow body. Within the close-up everyone eats, everyone approaches. How to create an examination of the expanse, but also the corner, dust? 

A woman both gathering and dying – split. Bedridden/swimming, pregnant/unpregnant, bereaved. Humming underneath is the celebration of a holiday as a relic. A face like Mahalia Jackson. I ask myself, ‘Have they always been watching this film?’ ‘What do they hope to outlive?’ Perhaps: the sterling silver, the crease of the thigh, a decibel, the poplar and the paper birch tree, the underside. ‘Okay, boom’, what developed later was a rumor, we noticed. Syncopation, recitation, the neighbors covering ground, a week of exits. Otherwise, delayed possibility. Objects shifting overnight, water spilling from a glass. More protein. Lines from a pillow set upon a face, bed sores, stretch marks on the stomach, low vision, soil/soiled, scooping out the debris, $15 copays, pining for a road trip across, or a child.

Giramondo is delighted to be publishing three novels by Helle Helle, ‘one of Scandinavia’s finest authors’ (Dagbladet), with translation by Martin Aitken. All three books are all set in the same fictional universe, with recurring characters and settings. they will be published in February 2026, followed by Hafni Says in September 2026 and Hey Hafni in February 2027. The titles will be publishing simultaneously by New Directions in the United States, and new literary press Akoya Publishing in the United Kingdom.

Over her three decades of writing, Helle’s works have been translated into twenty-four languages, and widely praised by critics worldwide. Her awards include the Danish Critics’ Prize, the Danish Academy’s Beatrice Prize and the P.O. Enquist Award, and she is a recipient of the Lifetime Award from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Giramondo is proud to share this remarkable work with readers in Australia and New Zealand over the coming twelve months.

Praise for Helle Helle:

Helle has enchanting gifts as a storyteller…the words so light they nearly float off the page.
New York Times

One of my favorite Danish writers – she’s the master.
Olga Ravn, The Guardian

One of Scandinavia’s finest authors. 
Dagbladet

Helle Helle’s minimalism isn’t boring; it crackles with mystery. It’s the everyday, and yet it’s insistently beautiful.
Weekendavisen

You laugh and laugh, cry and cry. Not bawling or sobbing, but quiet and intense. That’s what it’s like reading Helle Helle.
Politiken

Hafni’s story makes you both laugh and cry. Full of situational comedy and consummate humour keen to the quirks of language. Full of sorrow and anxiety, simultaneously conveyed and assuaged by Helle’s marvellous writing… I envy anyone who is about to read this novel.
Politiken 6/6 hearts

Helle Helle surpasses herself with Hafni’s shame and screw-ups…Like few writers, Helle Helle manages to reproduce herself in such a way that each new novel buds from the one(s) before it, not as a clone or a one-to-one copy, but as one of those small wonders that life (biological and literary) every once in a while bestows upon us. A kind of literary-evolutionary self-propagation, a self-refining process of cell division, the art of writing at its very best.
Berlingske 6/6 stars

Helle Helle distills the art of understatement.
Jyllands-Posten

Helle Helle is a star in her native Denmark… she’s worth the wait.
Anthony Cummins, Metro

Helle Helle is a beautiful stylist… deeply mysterious whilst staying entirely naturalistic – reminiscent of some of the less far out works of Marguerite Duras or Anna Kavan.
Mark Diston, Register

Deeply thoughtful.
Paris Review

The following is an excerpt from they (1 Feb 2026), an exquisite portrait of a mother and daughter by the award-winning cult Danish writer Helle Helle, translated by Martin Aitken. The first in a trilogy, the book will be followed by Giramondo’s publication of Hafni Says in August 2026 and Hey Hafni in February 2027.

On the third of April her mother says:

‘I must have swallowed a stone.’

They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out. Some small boys are playing football, shrieks and shouts, one of them’s crying up against the goalpost. Her mother’s in her winter coat. They’re having beefburgers, hence the walk. She’s wearing an Icelandic sweater herself, it’s still too early yet, the wind cuts through the wool.

‘A stone stone?’ she says, her mother nods.

‘A heavy one. Here.’

She pauses a second and puts a hand to her coat, below the chest. They carry on then towards the pond. The shrubberies are dotted with crocuses, they don’t care for crocuses.

On the way home they bump into Palle, her mother kicks up a leg in delight. Palle’s from Clothes Man, sometimes he comes over and eats his sandwiches with her mother in the shop. When it’s sunny they sit with their feet outside the back door. He’s going to see his niece and is in a hurry, he has a layer cake with him on the luggage rack. He turns and waves to them, the bike wobbles.

They don’t talk about anything on the way home. Just before the square her mother says:

‘I think I’ll ask Palle around for a roast beef dinner one day. Do you think we should?’

‘If you want.’

‘It’s not the sort of thing you cook for yourself, a roast beef dinner.’

She rearranges her room. The noticeboard goes over by the window. She has a number of cuttings and postcards and photographs. The cuttings are fixed with a single pin, they curl up from the bottom as the summer wears on. Her room faces the yard, she watches the dock plants grow at the foot of the rear building. The bin down there is full of hair. At one point a complete pair of plaits. She’s so taken aback that she drops the bin lid with a bang and steps in some coffee grounds, there are always so many coffee grounds.

In June her mother can’t get through her bread and jam. Normally she has a slice with honey too, and half a slice of white with cheese on top. The other half she wraps up and takes with her to the shop. Now she sits and drums her nails on the tabletop next to her plate, it’s strawberry jam, she blows a strand away from her face. She really isn’t hungry. But lots of people have no appetite first thing in the morning.

She herself shuttles between her yoghurt and the mirror in the hall, her German exam starts in an hour, she changes her shirt too.

‘You’re flitting about,’ her mother says.

‘I need to get a move on.’

‘Sit down, for crying out loud.’

‘But I’ll be late.’

‘You’ve got plenty of time.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘That suits you, just turn the collar up.’

‘Only you still do that.’

‘Maybe so,’ her mother says and looks at her plate, flexes her fingers.

One of the cuttings is from the Politiken newspaper, she finds a copy on the footpath outside the bakery. She’s never been aware that you can buy that paper at the bakery, and actually you can’t, the baker woman says. Someone’s had it with them and dropped it on their way out. It’s yesterday’s, they study it over the counter. Tourists, most likely. She buys a wholemeal roll and often a single-serve butter packet.

When school breaks up the teachers put on a sketch. Her mother claps and claps, now and then she flaps the song sheet in front of her face, it starts a wave. They open the side door onto the fields. It’s the emergency exit, they’re not supposed to. Outside, everything’s glorious green and blue. During the leavers’ speech, in a short, breathless pause, first the cuckoo is heard, then the lapwing, and everyone laughs.

Giramondo, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce the shortlist for The Poetry in Translation Prize, selected from 259 submissions in more than 55 languages.
 
The Poetry in Translation Prize is a biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. The prize is open to living, published poets from around the world, writing in any language. The winning poet and translator will receive an advance of $5,000, to be shared equally between them, followed by simultaneous publication in North America with New Directions, in the UK and Ireland with Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand with Giramondo. The winner will be announced in January 2026.
 
Poems from each shortlisted collection can be read at Granta online. 
 
With the Remains of My Hands by Priya Bains, translated by Alex Mepham (Norwegian)

A Beam of Light in the Winter from the Bowstring Played by a Crested Serpent Eagle by Bukun Ismahasan Islituan, translated by Hugu Sutej (Bunun, Isbukun dialect)
 
The Dust Museum by Liu Ligan, translated by Dong Li (Chinese/Mainland)
 
Water’s Edge and Other Poems by Hiyori Kojima, translated by James Garza (Japanese)
 
Help Me Change My Bandages by Maniniwei, translated by Emily Lu (Chinese/Taiwan-Malaysia)
 
Just Land by Jaku Mata, translated by Eric Abalajon (Filipino)
 
The Past Is a Lonesome Town by Osdany Morales, translated by Harry Bauld (Spanish)
 
Life on Three Wheels by E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya, translated by Samodh Porawagamage and Kasun Pathirage (Sinhala)

With the Remains of My Hands by Priya Bains, translated by Alex Mepham (Norwegian)
 
Through a flock of voices, a choir of close and distant relatives – parents, sons and daughters, uncles, aunts and grandparents – the eight poetic sequences in this collection give life to a large extended family, split between contemporary reality in Norway and a remembered life in Punjab. This collection is an embrace and a confrontation, full of sights, smells, colours, objects and stories. With the Remains of My Hands is written in a language both lived in yet distant, to mark the different ways a family reacts to the grief of migration. 
 
Priya Bains is a poet, essayist and translator living in Oslo. She was educated at the Academy of Creative Writing in Hordaland (Skrivekunstakademiet), Bergen, and the Danish Academy of Creative Writing (Forfatterskolen), Copenhagen. She is the editor-in-chief at the journal Vinduet and was awarded the 2022 Olav H. Hauge Scholarship and the 2022 Bergen Literature Festival Scholarship. With the Remains of My Hands was nominated for the 2021 Tarjei Vesaas Debut Prize and in 2025 Priya Bains was named as one of the best Norwegian writers under 35 by Norsk Litteraturfestival and Morgenbladet.. 
 
Alex Mepham is a writer, translator and critic living in York, UK. Alex Mepham has been awarded a Northern Writers’ Award and has had poetry, translations and criticism appear in various journals including The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, Prototype anthology, andModern Poetry in Translation. Alex Mepham is an alumnus of the 2023–2024 Emerging Translators Mentorship with the National Centre for Writing.
 
A Beam of Light in the Winter from the Bowstring Played by a Crested Serpent Eagle by Bukun Ismahasan Islituan, translated by Hugu Sutej (Bunun, Isbukun dialect)
 
Bukun weaves personal and historical trauma around aspects of the cosmic in a voice both ancient and immediate, speaking for a people, yet retaining a deeply intimate ‘I’. The living relationship with the land is the anchor of this collection, which speaks to colonization, cultural erasure, ecological devastation and the enduring power of ancestral identity. Environmental entities, such as Mount Usaviah, are not just settings but characters and sources of identity. In a time of global environmental crisis, his connection to the land offers a vital and urgent perspective of resistance and resilience. 
 
Bukun Ismahasan Islituan – an elder of the Bunun people – was born in the Namaxia district Kaohsiung of the Isbukun Bunun in Indigenous Taiwan. While participating in the first wave of Indigenous rights movements, he began exploring the collective memory of the Bunun people and writing poems in his endangered mother tongue: the Isbukun dialect of the Bunun language, spoken by about 20,000 people living in central and southern mountainous areas of Taiwan. His previous collections include Walking through the Moon in Time and Space, Moonlight of Formosan Sugar Palm and Bukun Bilingual Poetry: Where the Sun Revolves. In 2024 he won the Kaohsiung Literature & Art Award, and he has been chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Cultural Foundation and was a founding president of the Bunun Languages Association. 
 
Hugu Sutej, from Tavokan of the Siraya people, is a veteran tribal mobilizer and organizer. He joined the ICCA Consortium in 2013 as the founding regional coordinator for East and North Asia until 2023 and is an active participant in the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. An elder himself, Sutej has been the chief advisor and co-founder of the Indigenous Taiwan Self-Determination Alliance since 2019, an organization that strives for inclusive nation-building based on recognizing the autonomy of all creatures.
 
The Dust Museum by Liu Ligan, translated by Dong Li (Chinese/Mainland)
 
The first section of The Dust Museum consists of narrative poems that elucidate the politics and personalities of people tangled up in precarious situations and inescapable histories, taking form from the ancient Chinese masters speaking through the voice and veil of pining courtesans. The second part of the book shows Liu’s experimentations with what exists ‘in the steam of this living’, as the ethereal and the earthy, the small and the spiritual, the meditative and the impassioned come together. 
 
Liu Ligan is an acclaimed Chinese poet, novelist, critic and editor. He is the author of the poetry collections The Dust Museum and Flying Low, as well as the novel Every Morning, Every Evening. He was also a former key member of the influential literary group THEY. His works have been awarded numerous prizes, and have been translated into English, French and German, and have appeared recently in in 128 Lit, Asymptote, theBombay Literary Magazine, Lana Turner and Modern Poetry in Translation.
 
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French and German. A translator-in-residence at Princeton University for fall 2025, his full-length English translations from the Chinese include his PEN/Heim-winning The Gleaner Song by Song Lin, The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu and his PEN/Heim-winningThe Ruins by Ye Hui, which is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. His debut poetry collection, The Orange, was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.
 
Water’s Edge and Other Poems by Hiyori Kojima, translated by James Garza (Japanese)
 
Through tightly controlled narrative poems, Kojima visits the site of the family as a source of pungent humour and potent mythology. Embracing the possibilities of the lyric mode as a way to practice a fictional address, these poems register the weight of the fictional in ‘reality’, and the role that the speculative plays in any utterances about the self, in poetry and in life. Kojima’s lines work in waves, with a cohesion produced in the spilling over of one into the next, the result of an artful use of syntax which allows for a flexible ordering of elements and ‘double-jointed’ lines which may or may not be enjambed. The mutability of these lines reinforces a thematic mutability: the unpredictability of bodies and the power of language to shape the self.
 
Hiyori Kojima was born in Tokyo in 1997 and raised in Fukuoka. In 2021, she won the 26th Nakahara Chūya Prize for her poetry collection Mizugiwa. She has published poems and essays in journals and periodicals such as Gendaishi Techo, Mita Bungaku, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun. She produced and performed new work in collaboration with international poets at JUPE (the Japanese UK Poetry Exchange) in 2023 and 2025. She is a member of the 20:30 Poetry Collective based in Tokyo. 
 
James Garza is a writer and translator based in Tokyo. He has a BA and an MA from the University of Arizona, and a PhD from the University of Leeds. His translation of Itō Shizuo’s ‘Going Home’ won the 2019 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation and Asymptote. His co-translation of Osamu Dazai’s The Final Years is slated to be published in 2026. He is currently researching transcreation and the language of the monstrous in horror and speculative fiction.
 
Help Me Change My Bandages by Maniniwei, translated by Emily Lu (Chinese/Taiwan-Malaysia
 
Help Me Change My Bandages speaks from life as a single mother and practicing artist ‘living at the foot of Taipei’. This collection thinks through care, the ways we rely on each other, on our mothers and children and cats, and the ways our care work might reveal our relations to the places we live and to our diasporic histories of migration. Portrayals of poverty lean against the callousness of the current world order as women cook, clean, care, make art. 
 
Maniniwei grew up in Malaysia and studied fine arts at university in Taiwan. Restarting her creative practice after the age of 30 as poet, writer, artist, she is the author of more than twenty books. Her first novel, Ghost Auntie, was selected for the Taipei International Book Fair Prize and was on Yazhou Zhoukan’s 2024 list of top ten novels from Asia. She lives in Taipei with two cats. 
 
Emily Lu is a poet, translator and psychiatrist. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the Desperate Literature Prize, and was selected for Best Small Fictions. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks,Night Leaves Nothing New and There is no wifi in the afterlife. She lives in Toronto.
 
Just Land by Jaku Mata, translated by Eric Abalajon (Filipino)
 
Jaku Mata’s poems often describe precarious living conditions in the Philippines, both in the urban and rural context, but always point to a way of making do and persevering. In these poems, refuge is something that is simultaneously being created and already here. Mata explores place both as a carrier and a façade, of history and of the future, of affection and of grief, and lastly as a refuge but also a point for departure for elsewhere.
 
Born in Iloilo, Jaku Mata is a cultural worker and formerly an organizer of fisherfolks and peasants in Negros. He is currently living in Quezon City.
 
Eric Abalajon’s translations have appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Firmament Magazine, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation and Tripwire. He has poetry collections forthcoming from FlowerSong Press and Atomic Bohemian. He lives near Iloilo City.
 
The Past Is a Lonesome Town by Osdany Morales, translated by Harry Bauld (Spanish)
 
​​The poems from The Past is a Lonesome Town are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime – Morales was born in Nueva Paz in 1981 – and on the other a testament of exile, the traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a problematic homeland. Throughout, capitalized English ‘prompts’ are the security questions required of immigrants hoping to access several online services which the newly arrived Morales only half-understood and, indeed, given Morales’ oblique ironies, questions which open trenchant implications for the poet’s new ‘American’ identity.
 
Osdany Morales was born in Nueva Paz, Cuba, in 1981. He is the author of the short fiction works Minuciosas puertas estrechas and Antes de los aviones, the novels Papyrus and Zozobra, the nonfiction book Lengua Materna, and the poetry collection El pasado es un pueblo solitario. His work has received the 2006 David Award, a 2008 Casa de Teatro prize, and the 2012 Alejo Carpentier Award. In 2017, Dalkey Archive published the English translation of Papyrus as The Last Librarian, translated by Kristina Bonsager.
 
Harry Bauld’s poetry collections are The Uncorrected Eye and How to Paint a Dead Man. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 and won the New Millennium Writings Award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize. He divides his time between the US and the Basque Country.
 
Life on Three Wheels by E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya, translated by Samodh Porawagamage and Kasun Pathirage (Sinhala)
 
Part-docupoetics, part-vignettes, the prose poems in Life on Three Wheels offer an insider’s look into the unexplored subculture of Sri Lankan taxis, known as three-wheelers. Full of sociological depth gained from the poet’s unique vantage point as a three-wheeler driver who talks with passengers, the collection deals with poverty, underdevelopment, environmental destruction, policing, race and class tensions, and gender and family dynamics, while making an impassioned plea for the stewarding of nature and people.
 
E.M. Palitha Edirisooriya works as a farmer and a three-wheeler driver in and around Dunagaha, Sri Lanka. He has been a columnist and contributor for several national newspapers. In addition to Life on Three Wheels (මාවතේ ත්‍රීවිල් ජීවිතේ) he has authored a pamphlet on gammadu, a traditional healing ritual of rural Sri Lanka. He dabbles in astrology during his free time.
 
Samodh Porawagamage is the author of two poetry collections: becoming sam and All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths (forthcoming). His writing focuses on the Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, colonial and imperial atrocities, and disproportionate impacts of climate change on rural and marginalized communities. He has worked as a journalist and a teacher.
 
Kasun Pathirage is a freelance writer and translator based in Colombo. He is currently working on his first book, a collection of Lovecraftian horror with a Sri Lankan twist. His literary translations have been published in The Ex-Puritan, ANMLY and elsewhere. Other than Life on Three Wheels, he has translated the selected poems of Thanuja Lumbini Thambawita.

Three Giramondo authors have been shortlisted in the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Eunice Andrada’s KONTRA and Ender Başkan’s debut Two Hundred Million Musketeers are finalists for poetry; and Lee Lai’s graphic novel Cannon is a finalist in the fiction category.

Read the judges’ comments below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

KONTRA is an exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism. The kontrabida, a Filipino soap opera villain, is invoked in the many afterlives of violence. By inhabiting the persona of opposition, the poet exhumes another self from the ruins of rape and empire in shifting temporalities. From Renaissance paintings to polyphonic choral voices, Andrada binds lucid and ethereal images together in vivid scenes, imaginatively pulling infinite futures from fracture. 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. 

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan

Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a compelling debut which weaves the idiosyncrasies of the world into its pages. Başkan’s poetics are lively and utterly ungovernable, in his refusal to bend to the idea of what a poetry collection should be. 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. 

Cannon by Lee Lai

Lee Lai’s masterful graphic novel considers the small, universal and intersecting catastrophes of everyday life. A charming book about a nervous breakdown, it’s also a salve, for who hasn’t felt frustrated, not heard, misunderstood, exhausted? The judges loved this book for the way it nudges at what words can’t do: in playful slippages where sentences go unfinished and words drop off the page, where Cannon’s internal storm goes unnoticed and black birds trouble the psychic weather. Instead, we get a phone ringing out, the hiss and flash of a hot pan, blips from a meditation podcast, a splash of red ink. We see characters in the bedroom, on the toilet, on the phone, taking out the rubbish. Breathing and sweating and startled and despairing. How do we let ourselves be known to others? What do we do when everything is too much? Where does our rage live and how do we harness it? These intimate questions dance across the page. And what beautiful pages they are; to read Cannon is to take tactile pleasure in its extraordinary design. We can’t all wreck a restaurant, but we can all read this playful, moving work and exhale.

The winners will be announced on Wednesday 25 February at a ceremony in Melbourne.

The following is a poem from p.52-3 of Two Hundred Million Musketeers (November 2025), Ender Başkan’s debut collection. In the book, the poet explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in.

Airport

my grandparents or uncles and aunties and cousins are returning home from returning home / the rest of the family early morning pilgrims to the airport / waiting for the silver doors to slide open / arrivals board spasming / DELAYED / LANDED / we all live close to the airport / international arrivals hall now / its 615am in the 1990s 2000s / perhaps all these memories have become one / poem / my mums parents have returned home / they say australia is home now / they say this might be their last time back / they like their home here their backyard here / my dede has arrived with new teeth / i am bamboozled / he is a handsome man / he has a new suit too and a tan / my anneanne has a new beret and gold / shes beautiful / my cousins and i have been waiting / playing with trolleys / we will get to school late this morning / we might get hash browns from maccas / an indenture is a legal contract that reflects an agreement between two parties / usually labour servitude / they say you only belong to a country when you bury a loved one in it / we kiss our grandparents quickly / one on each cheek / we try unzipping their luggage for gifts / who got what / i get a rip-off galatasaray top tho my team is fenerbahçe and also a silver chain / we dont make the pilgrimage anymore / but i offer pick-ups and drop-offs all the time / its good to see a friendly face on the other end / back then the aura of travellers / some gold dust that rubbed off onto you / probably more for me / id never been to turkey but i was turkish / our backyard was under a flightpath / look up and imagine / my cousin forgot how to speak english after six months there / my cousins with grandparents there / i had great-grandparents there i never met / my parents didnt take me back / my parents couldnt look back / my mum said too painful / my dad said you gotta move on / when home alone mum listened to turkish music / australia told us no dont go back / work / a debt / australia a spell / australia using up the best of us / my mum with a pocket koran in her bag / we were always close to the airport / zeki dede worked at istanbul airport / ali dede worked at ankara airport / thats how they got here / zeki dede worked at essendon airport / my dad worked at tullamarine airport / i did my work experience at the airport / mum took me to roger david and we bought two shirts a tie and pants / wed buy kfc and drive out to the airport to watch the planes land with dad / or take off / an airport a black hole that sucks in all around it / they say direct flights will soon start from melbourne to istanbul / just go to sleep and youre there / youre home / in istanbul they lived near the airport / my dedes dad was buried on its edge / one day they said – were expanding the airport so come dig up your kin / so my dede went and dug up his dad / exhumed his remains / and put him in a new cemetery / almost sixty years later / my dede dies / is buried at fawkner cemetery under a flight path / he dies while i am living in istanbul / i go to the cemetery and find his mum and dad and sit with them / merhaba i say aloud ben senin büyük torununum / ǒglun zeki benim dedemdir / çok uzaklarda / topraklara verildi / başımız sağ olsun / allah rahmet eylesin