Eunice Andrada, Ender Başkan and Lee Lai shortlisted for Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
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.
