AustLit

Poet, historian, and speculative-fiction author.

At the time of her death, aged 22, in 2014, Sophia Nugent-Siegal was a postgraduate student in ancient history at Macquarie University, from which she also held a undergraduate degree in ancient history. She was also a poet and an emerging speculative-fiction author. Periods of her youth had been spent in Italy and England, which influenced her work and study.

Her poetry collection, Oracle, was published in 2007, when she was 16, and includes poems from an earlier collection (never formally published), Antiquity, sections from which are available on her website. Oracle is a collection of poems based on the stories of classical Greco-Roman mythology. She also published the long poem Edge: Seasons of Childhood (a meditation on the four seasons), which won the Taronga Poetry Prize Nature Award, and was included in the anthology Poems by Young Australians, Vol. 6.

Other unpublished poetry collections include Loose Leaves, poems from which were read at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2009 and Rough Sleepers, her final collection. Sections from both of these collections are available on her website. Some of Sophia's work has been published posthumously, including two in Quadrant's October 2019 edition ('Poseidon or Zeus' and 'Osiris') and one in Quadrant's October 2020 edition ('In Passing').

As of 2017, Sophia's speculative fiction remains unpublished: plans included a series of science-fiction novels set in the far future in a human space colony.

An award in Sophia's name, the Sophia Nugent-Siegal Award, commissions an original poem by a poet each year: winners include Nathan Shepherdson and M.T.C. Cronin.

Source: Information supplied by Robyn Nugent.