‘rock flight is an extended poetic negotiation with certainty: the certainty of colonial violence, of dispossession, of the forces that degrade home and homeland, and of the suffering to self and family and collective identity that comes of these modern conditions. rock flight also performs the certainty of witnessing, of testimony, of the bonds of family and memory.’

‘Castro has crafted a fine and profound novel. Abe does not always find language consoling, but the lyric beauty of Chinese Postman, its restless wisdom and bitter comedy, bestow a rare gift on readers.’

Opening to submissions on 15 July, the Poetry in Translation Prize is open to living poets from around the world, writing in any language other than English.

‘Things happen in the stories, but they are less plot-driven than shaped by a pleasure in plottiness, a sense that what happens is less important than the wild processes through which what happens is mediated, represented, remembered, repressed. In this sense, my feeling is that a reader is finally left with something of a narrative theory, but a theory of the best kind: immanent in each sentence, full of life and mystery and possibility.’

‘all they want to do is sip cold-brew mochaccinos, / talk about coloured girls through a wall of built-in bookshelves, / and move to new zealand for a better life.’

The judges commended the ‘evocative and very elegant design’; the ‘uniformity across the series’; and ‘the quotes on the back.’ The six-book poetry series includes works by Kate Fagan, Judith Beveridge, Hasib Hourani, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Šime Knežević and Grace Yee.

‘The poems are rich with symbolic suggestion, crafted to speak against cruelty and legal incoherence. rock flight is a rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone.’

‘When I cut into these histories and played with fragments – text, images, voices – across different time-zones to draft some of the poems, my goal was not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it ‘breathes’ there.’

Hourani’s rock flight and Kate Middleton’s Television have been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, with rock flight also a finalist for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

‘Some [stories] are purely fictional, some are partly autobiographical, or give clues – and red herrings – about my life, or rather gestures towards the narration and representation of it: as quotidian, magical, emotional, comedic.’

‘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.’