Eunice Andrada and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle shortlisted for Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry
Eunice Andrada and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle have been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry in the 2026 Queensland Literary Awards. Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Butcher-McGunnigle is recognised for her book of prose poems Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama. The announcement was made on 29 July.
Read the judges’ comments below.
KONTRA by Eunice Andrada
A book of exceptional formal ambition and imaginative force, KONTRA enlarges the possibilities of the contemporary lyric. Through its deft interplay of lyric, persona and documentary fragments, the collection moves between the personal and the historical, the mythical and the contemporary, blurring the boundaries between them while sustaining a rare urgency throughout. 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.
Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
The voice at the core of this collection of prose poems is unique and striking. This is a book that warrants rereading: its phrases appear and reappear in ever more inventive ways as the poet adopts intricate and unpredictable patterns that are variously bleak, witty, playful and eerie. The collection endlessly recombines and repurposes language, finding in collage and repetition a form of transformation. The past inevitably returns across these poems, transformed always by the poet’s charismatic voice.
