Jenny Grigg wins ABDA award for Best Designed Series

Jenny Grigg’s poetry cover series has won Best Designed Series at the 2025 Australian Book Design Awards. The announcement was made on Friday 23 May in Sydney.

The judges commended the ‘evocative and very elegant design’; the ‘uniformity across the series’; and ‘the quotes on the back.’ ‘You just want to own these,’ they concluded. ‘Great format, and beautiful production.’

Says Grigg: ‘This is the third series of Giramondo poetry books for which I have created cover designs. In an increasingly intangible world, the covers in this third series treat books as physical items that are turned over in people’s hands, as they read them, consider reading them, or pass them on to other people. The artworks were created by painting my fingers and handling blank paper wrapped around already published A5 Giramondo books. Digital tools were used only for reproduction purposes, in fact care was taken to resist all types of visual modifications available in graphic design software. The fingerprints are actual size.’

The six-book series, published over 12 months, begins with Kate Fagan’s Song in the Grass and ends with Grace Yee’s Joss: A History. The four other titles are Tintinnabulum by Judith Beveridge, rock flight by Hasib Hourani, The Prodigal by Suneeta Peres da Costa, and In Your Dreams by Šime Knežević.

Grigg, who was inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame in 2020, has won numerous awards for her work. Learn more on her website.