rock flight by Hasib Hourani wins 2025 Mary Gilmore Award

Hasib Hourani’s debut collection rock flight has won the 2025 Mary Gilmore Award, a prize given for the best first book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. The announcement was made on 30 July, a little over a month after the book won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Read the judges’ comments below.

‘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… It is a profound honour to nominate this book as the winner of the Mary Gilmore Award.’

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney. Learn about upcoming events featuring Hourani here.