Fiona Wright wins the Dame Mary Gilmore Award

Congratulations to Fiona Wright. Her poetry collection Knuckled has been awarded the prestigious Dame Mary Gilmore Award, for a first collection of poetry.

The judges’ citation is as follows:

Just about every poem in this volume is impressive, masterful, suggestive, discomfiting. This is forceful poetry that lives up to its title, showing violence, damage, anxiety: seismic tremors of personal, cultural and global dimensions. From the ‘locals’ of Sydney’s various ‘Wests’ to Sri Lankan and other south-east Asian and Pacific memories, images, Wright interrogates eg. her grandfather’s stories of war, Marjorie Barnard’s persimmons and waterways as different old Adaminaby flooded and the turn-of-the century Crimean coast with its ‘baigneurs’ (men who helped ladies take to the waters). These poems show ‘bruising’ to be a mark of human experience and writing. At once both physically ‘real’ and as well highly metaphorical Wright’s poems confront, tease and detain us with their complex insights and serious intelligence.