KONTRA by Eunice Andrada wins 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry

Eunice Andrada has won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The announcement was made at a ceremony on Thursday 25 February at The Wheeler Centre.

‘Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida, a woman branded as the antagonist; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story,’ says Andrada in her acceptance speech. ‘I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness and her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making.’

‘But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to write with and within language as a Filipino writer. Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to platform others who have written about our lives and our bodies for far too long.’

Read the judges’ report:

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. 

Eunice Andrada’s first collection Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021) gained several honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Stella Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. 

Also shortlisted for this year’s VPLA for Poetry was Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan. Watch a livestream of the awards ceremony below.