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Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (1980-)
Subcategory of New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
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Notes

  • Awarded to a published collection of poems or a single poem of book length.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2023

winner y separately published work icon The Singer and Other Poems Kim Cheng Boey , Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2022 24485903 2022 selected work poetry

'In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age â" places and times rendered in vivid, sensory detail â" to give a haunting exploration of memory and the emigrant experience: departures and arrivals; family and home; exile, longing and loss.'  (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon Accelerations and Inertias Dan Disney , Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2021 21865063 2021 selected work poetry

''Dan Disney's accelerations & inertias is a remarkable work of self-critiquing, inverting hybridity. This is a restive book in which new skyscrapers and museums, temples and consumer fetishism are complementary, and not necessarily in tension. In these ‘distillations’ there is no quietism, and the ‘museum of the future’ is a question with fear and doubt in the air about it. The key to this work – the best of Disney’s, I think – remains the critique of a crisis of capital, a deep respect for environment, a deep respect for culture and its complexities, a wonder mixed with a toughness of observation and understanding of what being an observer means.'' (Publication summary)

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon Throat Ellen van Neerven , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2020 18673599 2020 selected work poetry

'Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines alight on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart. Van Neerven is unsparing in the interrogation of colonial impulse, and fiercely loyal to telling the stories that make us who we are.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2019 14816243 2019 selected work poetry

'Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness represents a new departure in my writing. It is a single book-length poem made up of fragments and shorter pieces in varied styles that build towards the last line, which is the book's title. I have aimed at a sparse, open simplicity in this book, a clarity and brevity sufficient to carry the weight of the space I am now in, with my illnesses, my partner's cancer and the acute sense of time's limits. The poems question what it might mean to live and write in the immediate knowledge of death, what response we can find when out of the blue we, or the one we love, are told we have a very limited time, three or five years, to live. At the artistic as well as the personal level, there is also a need for balance in the work, as beauty, tenderness, the presence of the natural world, light as well as dark, insist on their place in the poem.'

Source: Author's blurb.

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon Interval Judith Bishop , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2018 13514494 2018 selected work poetry

'Bishop’s attentive poetic gaze unfailingly reveals the luminous. In Interval, her poems – many addressed to a lover, or to children – explore intimacy, solitude and the ‘chemical mess’ of human love. As Carl Phillips said of Event, ‘These are splendid poems indeed, whose intelligence, vision, and sheer beauty at every turn persuade.’ '  (Publication summary)

Works About this Award

Poet Ellen van Neervan Wins Book of the Year, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Multicultural NSW Award at NSW Premier's Literary Awards Dee Jefferson , 2021 single work column
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , April 2021;
'Young Mununjali Yugambeh author Ellen van Neerven pulled off a hat-trick at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards for their second poetry collection, Throat, at an online ceremony on Monday evening.' (Introduction)
Judging Blind Peter Kenneally , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , April 2015;
'A brief and unscientific survey of prizes in Australia had equally unsurprising results. From the Premier’s Awards in Victoria and New South Wales to the Newcastle Poetry Prize to the Josephine Ulrich or the Anne Elder Awards, among others, my list mirrors Fulton’s. Needless to say this is not a consciously racist exclusion, but a structural problem in Australian letters. Samuel Wagan Watson and Ali Cobby Eckermann, both Indigenous poets, won the NSW Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, in 2005 and 2013 respectively. But in the awards I looked at they seem to be the only exceptions, especially of high profile poets who identify as non-white. That is only two out of a possible 120. As for the judges, it may be close to a clean sweep – after all you are hardly going to be called on as a judge unless you have won an award or two yourself.'
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