The Cyprian by Amy Crutchfield wins Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry
Amy Crutchfield is the winner of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with her debut collection, The Cyprian.
The announcement was made on Thursday 12 September at a ceremony at the National Library of Australia. The book was in competition with four other poetry books, including two works by Giramondo authors: In the Photograph by Luke Beesley, and The Drama Student by Autumn Royal.
This is the second consecutive year that a Giramondo author has won the PMLA for Poetry, with Grace Yee winning the 2023 prize with Chinese Fish.
Read the judges’ comments on The Cyprian below.
Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian reappraises the figure of Aphrodite—Greek goddess of beauty, lust, love, procreation and passion—from a contemporary vantage point, finding in Aphrodite a capacious and complex avatar for love and its violent destruction across time.
In incisive lyric poems, Crutchfield brings the mythic into contact with the quotidian, using Aphrodite to explore women’s loves, needs and losses. Counterpointing poems concerned with the female perspective are explorations of male desire, misogyny, power and control. Crutchfield is alert to the idealisation, eroticisation and demonisation of women in visual art and history and considers these questions in relation to the deifying gaze in Bonnard and Picasso’s cruelty to his lovers, among others, demanding we reckon with old shibboleths: ‘There are not enough museums / for all we once believed in,’ the poet tells us.
While Crutchfield brings a classicist’s range of reference to bear in The Cyprian, the poems are frank, lively and acerbic, as befits one ‘who says what she means and / means what she says.’ Crutchfield’s lines are almost aphoristic in their concision yet see through to worlds magnitudes larger, and her voice arrives fully-fledged, and entirely in command.
Along with the other winners of this year’s PMLA’s, Crutchfield will be in conversation with the Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival Beejay Silcox on Friday 13 September at the National Library Theatre and Foyer. Learn more here.
