‘The judging panel reflected on, rather than judged, how each title gave us a new insight into our humanity. To that end, Jessica Au’s quiet contemplative prose about a mother and a daughter traveling was considered the needed juxtaposition to the past year.’ – Judges’ report

‘I think it is a common experience, a kind of haunting in a way, the sense that you are close to something that is significant but that nevertheless eludes you. Slippages could be a good word to describe it. It’s the intersection between the absolutely ordinary and the occult.’

‘The first sounds I heard – I tell my friends – were the clatter of dice cubes and ice cubes. Between his chef-ness and his cigars he used up all the oxygen in the room, and so was happiest with women who breathed shallowly and aspired only to excellence in the art of devotion.’

Ahead of the Sydney launch of Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott presents an annotated playlist of songs he loved while writing the book. Tracks include those by OneFour, DJ Loser, Blue Divers, Bell Witch, and Troth.

‘While experimentalism, as a framework, can defuse the impact of specific experiments, for myself, in this case, it keeps the writing alive to poetry’s possibilities: not just in terms of form (in its various aspects), but in terms of what can be said, and the range of voice deployed: the positions and positioning of voice.’

A poem from Googlecholia, a 2022 collection by the winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

‘Unlike other fictions I’ve worked on in my adult life, I felt like I had to see this through to completion, that I could not write anything else until it was out of my way. Now that it’s finished, I feel like I’ve been evicted from a cold but nevertheless sheltering home.’

A poem from Mirabilia, a 2022 collection by the acclaimed Australian poet and author, Lisa Gorton.

‘These poems are crowded with quotes, events, anecdotes, inventories, and fragments of myth, because I was trying to bring into poetry that heteroglossia (raznorechie, ‘varied-speechedness’) which Mikhail Bakhtin found only in the novel: a clash of different voices, different conceptions of world.’

‘The limited-consensus reality ignores the strangeness of most lives, of the consciousness that lives in us. Who was I then? Who am I really? Am I “George” or “Yiorgos”? Angel or devil? Well, both, of course.’

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.