A poem from Askew by Andy Jackson (October 2026), his first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.

Weathering

you begin to suspect you are already stone
each day a weight that does not shift with rest
with time alone or a fistful of supplements

                    thoughts become rubble, then a puff of dust
                    but the job offers keep coming, requests
                    for support, for words with heft or heat

as you sleep, a pebble drops into your chest
by day, random avalanches in your actual heart
a sedimentary need to be prone, quiescent

          it hurts to mineralise, a constant furnace and settling
          your only life hack, chronic endurance
          your five-year plan, the welcoming of moss

not trending or even relevant but weathering
because stones, you know, don’t lack feelings
they absorb them, are pure compressed existence

                    it’s a gift and a theft, this falling into earth
                    let it all accrete – work, memory, healing
                    life, seismic, is building your resume of loss
                    this slow erosion, your bedrock callin

Lisa Gorton reflects on Mirror Landscape (1 May 2026), a major collection of new and selected poems by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet. The new poems focus on mirrors and landscapes as they are employed by the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, with a particular fascination for the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

‘The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’, said Walter Pater in 1873. ‘She had simply become an incubus,’ said art critic Bernard Berenson. ‘Glad to be rid of her,’ he added, when the painting was stolen in 1911. Duchamp scrawled a moustache across her face, wrote L.H.O.O.Q. on his photograph of it – sounding out the words ‘elle a chaud au cul’ (‘her arse is on heat’). In his essay Why they attack the Mona Lisa, Salvador Dali argued it was because she looked like a mother – only she ‘smiled ambiguously’. ‘The world’s most famous painting’, says the Louvre website now.

I wanted to rediscover this portrait of a woman who has the look of someone looking, not being looked at. Over six years I wrote the title poem ‘Mirror Landscape’. The poem works across a gap, like that gap between a mirror and its landscape. On one side of it is history. On the other, invention; and each side can be read without the other. The long poem is also mirrored in a sequence of prose poems, ‘Speaking Shadows’. I was thinking about art’s relationship to power, reflecting on Leonardo da Vinci’s last days in Rome, working with mirrors and their distorted perspectives under Giuliano de’ Medici’s patronage.

In my years looking at this painting, I discovered a heraldic device hidden in shadows inside its landscape. That heraldic language was once as familiar as company branding is now. But the language of heraldry is lost; now that device presents itself as a little anomaly, a strangely dark curlicue of shadow in that vast landscape at her back. Anyone can open one of the Louvre’s photographs of the painting and see it for themselves.

This device was the personal emblem of Leonardo’s last Italian patron, Giuliano de’ Medici. Giuliano adopted it late in 1512; it marked his return to Florence after eighteen years of exile. In 1513 his brother, recently elected pope, called Giuliano to Rome and handed Florence to their nephew. So, this device signals that the picture in the Louvre belongs to those few months when Giuliano led Florence.

This confirms an eyewitness account of the picture. In October 1517 a cardinal and his secretary went to visit Leonardo in his studio. Leonardo was old, his right arm was paralysed, he had a pension from the king of France. The cardinal’s secretary was keeping a diary. He copied down what the old artist said. The artist showed three paintings: the patron saints of Florence, John the Baptist and St. Anne, and a commission from ‘the late Magnifico, Giuliano’: ‘una certa donna Fiorentina, facta di naturale’. ‘A certain Florentine woman, painted from life’. Or, ‘a certain female Florentia, painted from life’.

Marking when the portrait was painted and why, this little device challenges old assumptions about who it is looking out at us from the bullet-proof glass, and smiling—

Read an excerpt from Mirror Landscape: New and Selected Poems (May 2026), a major collection by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet Lisa Gorton. ‘Apocrypha’ is from a new series of poems by Gorton called Caesars, which reflects her fascination with the perspectives of space and time, and the ways in which memory and landscape, the past and the future, fold in and out of each other.

Mary Magdalene, desirous of sovereign contemplation,
sought a right sharp desert—
and abode there by the space of thirty years—

At midday a gong sounds, the sea
turns on its side and I see my cloud
coming from a long way off to feed me—
stately and vague, slipping easily across the mirror-
like distance dividing there from here,
filling the cave with its damp
down feathers each one made of that fine-
ground marble light sinks into until I
lie myself down in the fullness of stone—
Stone tongue in a stone mouth
speaking only in the carving of my hair, stopped 
gestures of my hands—

Sleeping and waking, there and here. Only, 
after so long, it gets confusing.
Which is which? For instance, the dead woman
left on a mountain—that is written.
Yes. She slept in stone under a mantle, suckling
the wordless child who had seen nobody—
this child feeding stones to the sea, the sea 
mumbling over them, raw-gummed,
spitting out that fine-ground marble that scuds
the top of the sea, making
statues of horses, statues of gulls, bringing its 
hammer down on them repeatedly—

What happened to the child, I’d like to know?
I think he’s still there
throwing his stones to the sea. Each time I
sleep the sea sucks back leaving such
ranks of statues—No, leaving the one statue repeating 
as far as the eye can see—One
by one, night by night, it walks towards me
and its right eye is my right eye,
forgetful as a mirror. One by one it stops,
pinches a strand of my hair, eases my
death a little way out from my skull, this
long gold hair I walk around in. Pelt.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle reflects on Autobiography of a Marguerite, her debut poetry book re-released by Giramondo (April 2026) in which she explores chronic illness, familial dysfunction and the discovery of a sense of self. The book is published simultaneously with her new collection, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, and follows her popular novella, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

I began thinking about this book in 2011, when I was working on another manuscript (Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama) and studying life writing and autobiography at the University of Auckland. Reading and thinking about George Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood and My Life by Lyn Hejinian were important precursors to working on Autobiography of a Marguerite. In 2012, I was enrolled in the Master of Creative Writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington. My thesis intention was to write an innovative autobiography about family and illness, and that became Autobiography of a Marguerite. 

I developed a chronic inflammatory illness at age 14, which has affected and continues to affect my day-to-day life. I did not get to have a normal teenage experience of partying or hanging out with friends, instead I was worrying about how and when my body would further deteriorate, whether I’d lose my eyesight or my ability to walk, what side effects medications would have, and whether I’d be able to achieve any of my future goals and dreams. I spent a lot of time at medical appointments and at home, bored and depressed. 

In writing the book, however, I did not want to write about a journey of my particular specific illness, rather I wanted to explore the social aspect of illness in relation to identity and family, and I wanted to use illness as a concept, to illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self, tying it in with a relationship where the daughter struggles to separate herself from her mother. And in order to write this book, in particular the middle section, I decided to follow the writing advice of ‘write as if your parents are dead.’ My mother was not pleased when she found out her name was in the title of the book. Before it came out, whenever people asked her about it, she pretended to forget the name.

As with Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, I was interested in the idea that we subconsciously choose to be ill because it fulfils certain internal needs. In a family system where co-dependency and enmeshment are present (diminished boundaries and diminished sense of agency) I believe autoimmune disease is likely to develop. The immune system is a boundary between you and the outside world, and the first task of the immune system is distinguishing self from non-self. Modern medicine describes autoimmunity as the immune being unable to distinguish between self and non-self and begins to attack its own tissues. To me, autoimmunity is a response to repressed agency and repressed anger, and the body pointing to the need for boundaries – physical, emotional, spiritual. In the book, it is often difficult to distinguish the narrator from her mother. The mother’s past affects the daughter in the present, and the daughter’s present affects the mother’s concept of the past. ‘It is not even a story… The happening is still happening… We are not ill, but needy…’

I wanted to use illness as a concept, to illustrate the struggle for autonomy and a sense of self.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle reflects on her new book of poetry, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama (April 2026), a collection of prose poems which explore the relationship between thinking patterns and ill health. The book is published simultaneously with the re-release of her debut collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite, and follows her popular novella, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

Although this book appears as my third publication, I actually wrote it in 2011, when I was 20. I was studying English and Psychology at the University of Auckland. I had an intention to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML (Wellington, NZ) the year after, and wanted to make sure I could complete a book on my own first, outside of a writing workshop programme. I completed the manuscript in only a few months, and I remember listening to The Beatles’ album Revolver on repeat on my CD player while working on it in my mother’s bedroom, where the computer was (I didn’t have a laptop). It has been strange revisiting these poems almost 15 years after they were first composed. In a way it feels like a posthumous publication.

At the time, I had become sick of writing lyric poems and wanted to try something different. Taking inspiration from Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘The Rejection of Closure’, (and her book, My Life) I wanted to use parataxis and non-linearity in the book to subvert traditional narrative and lyric expectations. There are many ways for a reader to step into the room of each poem; each sentence can be a complete story on its own, as well as coming into play with preceding and following sentences, and with the larger narrative framework of the paragraph. In contrast to regular prose, the sentences are written and arranged to decrease syllogistic movement and increase polysemy, leading to ‘gaps’ in which the reader must bring their own beliefs/experiences. 

The prose poems focus on cycles of belief, life scripts, anxiety and disease (dis-ease). The book takes ideas from psychology theories (such as transactional analysis), and metaphysical theories of illness, attempting to explore the way we chose ‘life scripts’ for ourselves from messages we internalise from others at a young age. Each poem creates resonances with other poems as the book develops (most noticeably in the use of specific repeated phrases).

At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured. My own experience with chronic illness led me to holistic approaches that highlighted the link between the mind and body. My mother had a copy of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, and this book became an important part of how I related to my illness, as well as being an influence on my writing. Hay’s philosophy is built on the foundation that our thoughts shape our reality, and negative thought patterns could lead to emotional and physical suffering. In Love Your Disease: It’s Keeping You Healthy, (another influential self-help book for me), John Harrison posits that disease is not the result of external forces but rather a subconscious choice, a way of getting our needs met – needs such as attention, love, respite, or even the affirmation that the world is dangerous/unsafe. ‘If you have no need of major illness’, Harrison wrote, ‘you will have no major illness.’ This is controversial idea, which many people find threatening, although these days books like The Body Keeps the Score have become mainstream, and we have evidence-based correlations between adverse childhood experiences and the likelihood of developing autoimmune disease. My first published book, Autobiography of a Marguerite, written a year later, further explores these themes, and I see Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama as its companion.

At the time of writing, I was very interested in the idea that disease is both self-created and self-cured.

Eunice Andrada won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The ceremony was livestreamed by The Wheeler Centre. Watch Eunice’s acceptance speech and read the transcript below.

Thank you so much to the judges for recognising my craft with this award. Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida – a woman branded the ‘antagonist’; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story. I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness, in her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making. But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to work with and within language as a Filipina writer.  

Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to instead platform others who have been writing about our lives and our bodies for far too long. I come from a lineage of women who could not write their story themselves because they were too busy raising children on their own as the matriarchs of their families. I am deeply grateful for the love and creativity and imagination with which they raised me. Because it takes so much creativity and imagination to figure out how to survive while raising a big family while having little material means.

I want to thank my mother Dinna, my grandmother, my legion of aunts, and my three sisters – to whom I dedicated this book – thank you. I also want to thank my publisher, Giramondo, and the entire team, for all the care and the work you’ve put into my books. Thank you to the poets in this category, I’m so honoured to be beside you. To the poet Gloria Demillo, who is with me tonight and has been with me since we were both 16, writing poems for poetry slams – thank you.  And finally, thank you to the community of poets who have raised me up for many years, especially to my mentor, Merlinda Bobis, who guided me in the creation of KONTRA. I owe this award to all of you.

Eunice Andrada has won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The announcement was made at a ceremony on Thursday 25 February at The Wheeler Centre.

‘Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida, a woman branded as the antagonist; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story,’ says Andrada in her acceptance speech. ‘I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness and her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making.’

‘But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to write with and within language as a Filipino writer. Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to platform others who have written about our lives and our bodies for far too long.’

Read the judges’ report:

KONTRA is an exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism. The kontrabida, a Filipino soap opera villain, is invoked in the many afterlives of violence. By inhabiting the persona of opposition, the poet exhumes another self from the ruins of rape and empire in shifting temporalities. From Renaissance paintings to polyphonic choral voices, Andrada binds lucid and ethereal images together in vivid scenes, imaginatively pulling infinite futures from fracture. Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA is a testament to lyrical mastery. 

Eunice Andrada’s first collection Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021) gained several honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Stella Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. 

Also shortlisted for this year’s VPLA for Poetry was Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan. Watch a livestream of the awards ceremony below.

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka land, at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in south-east Queensland in 1957. An internationally renowned Mununjali poet, he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights in the 1970s, and in the 1990s, after the death of his brother Daniel Yock, as a leading figure in protests against Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. His poetry collections date from the early 1980s; Harvest Lingo, his fourteenth collection, was published by Giramondo in 2022. It won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Prime MInister’s Poetry Award, and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2025 Lionel received the prestigious Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died on 12 February 2026, at the age of 68.

At the time of his passing Lionel was working on his latest collection, Warrior with a Fighting Stick. He was that warrior, and in his poetry and painting, language was his fighting stick.

Here are two powerful poems from his most recent collection Harvest Lingo.

A First Note About the Regions

I opened the door that
Morning to the horror of society
Sis we got to pay another 250
To get our brother’s coffin to the church
We already given all we got

Intruder Wants the Writer

To write as a child to be a man
No boxes of childhood voice
my present, writing details.
No hidden child backward growing up
gains my learned on the road sky.
Future’s song dance lit pen friends for me in evenings
Not one sort of personal fireworks voice,
gave rise to the now existence dared.
Reluctance response by these ages,
Spare me not remorseful teenage pandemonium.
Pare her tempest defiant with red yellow brown ochre.
Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided.
No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death. Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped
by swine trample readership.
Embellishing more than needed.

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.