Michael Farrell reflects on The Victoria Principle (1 May 2025), a debut work of fiction that follows six poetry collections the acclaimed Melbourne-based writer has published with Giramondo. The first three stories of The Victoria Principle were an attempt to write aspects of my life (clinical depression and breakdown; my childhood experience of farmlife; Catholicism in its […]

‘I had an idea that would enable me to conceptualise my long-held desire to adapt Nirvana’s song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as an artwork. The idea was that I would boil an egg for as long as the song, which was, officially, five minutes and one second, or 5:01. This was longer than I had thought: the track had always seemed to me like a thrash punk anthem – guitar, drums, chorus, and out.’

‘Kefala’s poetry may be rooted in the experience of migration, but there is something in this experience, the crossing of borders, the traversing of realities, the shifting of identities, which propels her poetry to the extremities of emotion – to terror, fear and desperation – and also, because the effects are so magical and strange – to wonder, awe and release.’

‘None of her works of decreation can morally purify the reader, since that is the job of homilies. Kefala doesn’t aim to comfort. Still, I’m consoled by her exhilarating attention to life’s contradictions, and the ceaseless mystery of ourselves.’

‘I was swimming in a sea
of tombstones
as far as I could see
the surface crowded with
these frozen waves
tombstones to the horizon
ambushed by lifeless bodies
floating in the night.’

‘I was full of longing for unknown things – for open spaces, warm people, the scent of hot stones in the sun. A longing for something that would raise us, as in Byzantine paintings, make us float through the air, disappear in shafts of light, become a line in space. I was sure that there were others who felt the same. I kept watching them attentively to discern the signs.’

‘Over the whole shore, layer on layer of white veiling lifts and bells, flattens and hangs drifting. The boulders are great animals, diminishing slowly, torpid, already porous on the grey sand where soon not even bones will be left.’

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro will be published simultaneously by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions in early 2026.

‘What I look for in a poem is a sense of change, a startling gesture, a small mercy, a consolation, something negotiable. I think this is reflected too in the range of formal approaches with riffs, vignettes, suggestions, stock-taking and direct address. I want a poem to be more than a remnant or souvenir of an experience, but itself be an experience for the reader.’

‘And so was the brief: fetch the ‘pinch-bar’. / I peered into the small shed, / a corrugated cave of tools and such, / but I didn’t know what a pinch-bar was. / Back to him, I asked what it looked like, / he scolded: pinch-bar! pinch-bar!’

Bonny Cassidy’s Monument is a finalist in the non-fiction category, with Hasib Hourani’s rock flight a finalist for poetry. Manisha Anjali’s debut collection Naag Mountain was highly commended.

The five shortlisted works of fiction are by Rey Conquer, Neal Amandus Gellaco, Nick Holdstock, Giada Scodellaro, and Hollen Singleton. The winner will be announced in February 2025 and published in early 2026.

‘The book has the effect of mobilising one’s own store of knowledge, of ‘summoning’ it. This is a facet of all reading experiences maybe. But it is remarkable that it might be more legitimately ‘a fact’ about Chinese Postman than about other novels: Chinese Postman will be very different for different people.’

‘In both jazz and writing, you can hear previous melodies inside your DNA, the future coming out of the past, then you re-work it, going up and down the spiral staircase until you grow dizzy. You become a copy of yourself and you remake yourself every day. As someone once said, existence is plagiarism.’

‘Wright has gifted her readers a total life-world, a fantastical imaginary that challenges western knowledge, logic and expectations, enriches Australian literature, and gives sovereignty to Indigenous voices.’

‘Alexis [Wright] embodies an order of excellence and influence that is transformational for her readers, First Nations or otherwise.’