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.

Hasib Hourani’s debut rock flight and Kate Middleton’s collection Television have been shortlisted in the NSW Literary Awards for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, with rock flight also a finalist for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. The announcement was made on 29 April 2025 by the State Library of NSW. Read the judges’ comments below.

rock flight by Hasib Hourani

rock flight is a conceptually inventive collection that weaves together the political and deeply personal to create a powerful voice speaking against the moral, military and bureaucratic violences of colonialism. Unconventional forms combine with free verse to create a multilayered call to action, mobilising disparate fields of relationship, reference and understanding to form a cohesive whole that compels attention and empathy. 

Hasib Hourani’s work is grounded in the history and personal experience of Palestinian dispossession, detailing connection to land and people. The writing locates the human and immediate in events that have been distorted, ignored or manipulated by government and media. 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.

Television by Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton’s latest collection, Television, moves into new territory with a sustained meditation on mass culture. Part autobiography, part essay, all poetry, Television explores the personal and wider social effects of television culture with wit, insight, intelligence and a startling poetic discipline. Written in tight but conversational couplets, these poems reflect on how the self is at once mediated, dissociated and aggrandised by the media it encounters. They examine the porousness of the boundaries between ‘real life’ and imaginative worlds, and the parasocial connection between creators and fictional characters and their fans that is a defining aspect of contemporary culture. 

Middleton brings into profound focus experiences that are often thought of as ephemeral and trivial, paying particular attention to the creation of a feminine self, from the young girl whose experience is routinely dismissed or demonised, to the older woman reflecting on those internalised lessons; how ‘the panopticon lives in their guts’.

The winners of the awards will be announced on Monday 19 May 2025.