The award judges described Human Looking as a ‘sharp and brilliant collection…with powerful poetic skill and infinite compassion, this book illuminates the world differently and gives us a new way to see.’

‘Captured in the series of stories that make up An Ordinary Ecstasy are the voices of people strange to me, all of them in states of ordinary ecstasy – those moments of everyday intensity which punctuate the general calamity of consciousness.’

‘Although Zheng has published several books and her work has been enthusiastically received in China and in international poetry circles, her poetry has typically been viewed under a narrow rubric, namely that of “migrant worker poetry” and the “migrant worker poet”. While this is where Zheng’s literary career began, it is only one part of the story of Zheng’s life and work.’

A poem from the 2022 collection In the Roar of the Machine by the great Chinese contemporary poet Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.

Jenny Grigg has won the 2022 Australian Book Designers Association Award for Best Designed Series for her Giramondo poetry covers.

The first poem featured in Harvest Lingo, a 2022 collection by acclaimed poet, Indigenous rights activist and Murri man Lionel Fogarty.

‘Harvest the world. My next writing is power for inspiration and understanding. With life and eyes to read appreciation to complete a stimulating determination.’

This book offers portholes into the places where writing happens and portals to the new worlds and ways of living it might create. These essays bear witness to the resilience required to commit to the writing life – and to the vital transformative possibilities of literature, for writers, for readers and our culture.

In writing How to Be Between I realised that my story was about much more than hair. It is about claiming an individual identity, and communicating this, but it is also about how we exist in relationship with others, always, and how precious these relationships are. Finding the balance is an ongoing project.

‘Winter begins at three. Blue flakes of light dissolve from the texture of moss-stitch into the porosity of tulle, become so meagre they barely cover anything at all.’

Kefala had been writing down her impressions from the period when her family was first displaced from Romania to Greece after WWII, but the physical journals which provide the raw materials for her published Journals date from the early 1970s (her first poetry collection, The Alien, was published in 1973, her first work of fiction, The First Journey, in 1975).

Wherever home lies, it’s always on borrowed time – a house rented from strangers overseas, or the lease we seem to hold on our own lives. Our first home is the mother’s body; our individual space is always enmeshed with another person’s. We begin our lives connected, however isolated we might become, and several poems in this book dwell on the effects of the maternal bond, its duration and its apparent end, trying to find meaning in loss.

Andrada has been shortlisted for her poetry collection TAKE CARE, while Crawford has been shortlisted for No Document.

Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translated by Tiffany Tsao has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022.

A conversation between author Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao about Happy Stories, Mostly, longlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Happiness requires an endless list of privileges, in any part of the world. It is often the heteros that block us from accessing happiness. We queer are always thrown to the hampir, to the almost, and there the idea of happiness turns into the vampir.