Eunice Andrada and Ender Başkan shortlisted for Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry
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’.
