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Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry
Subcategory of Australian Centre Literary Awards
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History

The Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry is open to authors or composers of original verse or poetry in the English language. Entrants must be Australian citizens. Poems can be no less than 50 lines up to a maximum of 500 lines. To be eligible, poems must have been published within the last 12 months from the closing date in either book or journal form (print or electronic).

The Prize is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

Source: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/award/wesley-michel-wright-prizes-poetry Sighted: 3/12/2013.

Notes

  • Administered by the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts. The annual Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry is awarded to an author or composer of original verse or poetry in English and is open to Australian citizens. Each applicant must submit for assessment an appropriate poetic work. The prize is awarded by Council, on the recommendation of a selection committee appointed by Council on the recommendation of the Faculty of Arts.

    Source: University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts website, www.arts.unimelb.edu.au (sighted: 07/12/2009)

  • No indication of this award being given in 2022.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2023

winner y separately published work icon Like To The Lark Stuart Barnes , Perth : Upswell Publishing , 2023 25428797 2023 selected work poetry

'The long-awaited second collection from the winner of the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

'In his stunning collection of new poetry, Stuart Barnes reimagines the poetic form and fearlessly explores topics of illness, death, rape, remembrance, ecology and love.

'Like To The Lark is Stuart Barnes's accumulation of lifetime fascinations with music and sound, form and transformation. Beginning with an apparition of a doomed world brooding over itself and ending with a kvelling globe, this collection plunges into seas, scoots across countries and hurtles towards space.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon Mirabilia Lisa Gorton , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2022 24488703 2022 selected work poetry

'The poems in Mirabilia test the relationship between art and politics. They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked mammal implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.

'Written in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore’s poem The Pangolin w ith its sense of nature’s perpetuity lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence Great World Atlas tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s.

'It was written for Izabela Pluta’s artist’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation. The sequence Tongue reflects on da Vinci’s 1478 painting The Benois Madonna , including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino perhaps the painting’s model who gave birth to the child of the murdered man. Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon Wild Curious Air Jill Jones , Canberra : Recent Work Press , 2020 20910794 2020 selected work poetry

'Wild Curious Air is a conversation, a series of readings or observances, full of shiftings: of ideas, words and bodies; through breath and breathlessness; intimacies and desires; ecstatic and dreaming states; and continuous retrievals of memory. It is a book of play and pleasure that acknowledges the global emergencies of the 21st century, as a calling to and a calling up of things, big and small, close and distant, made in language, made while moving among and through the world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon After the Demolition Zenobia Frost , Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2019 16947976 2019 selected work poetry

'This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.

After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on – what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone – because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off – our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.'

Source: Author's blurb.

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon Look at the Lake Kevin Brophy , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2018 14451231 2018 selected work poetry

'These poems were written across 2016 when Kevin Brophy was living in the remote community of Mulan, home to the Walmajarri speaking custodians of the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) around Lake Paruku (Lake Gregory in many maps) in Western Australia.' (Summary)

Works About this Award

The Overflow Rosemary Sorensen , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6-7 December 2008; (p. 8)
A column canvassing current literary news including brief reports on several awards: the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Wesley Michel Wright Award for Poetry and the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
Shelf Life Rod Usher , 1986 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Age , 13 December 1986; (p. 15)
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