The Queensland Poetry Festival (QPF) is a small but spectacular literary fest with a mission as focused on creating community as it is on championing poetry and supporting its creators to define and achieve their successes.
Every year, Queensland Poetry Festival, and the creative powerhouses at Queensland Poetry, collaborate on a series of awards designed to both celebrate Australian poetry, and support writers to move forward in their careers. These awards are all judged blind – meaning the judges don’t know who wrote each work until they’ve made their decisions about winners – and every year, the quality of entries is astounding. It’s only fitting, then, that the first night of the festival offers a Welcome to Country and announces and celebrates the winners.
The Thomas Shapcott Prize is probably the best known of the QPF awards, giving emerging poets the chance to have their manuscript published by University of Queensland Press (UQP). For non-writers, that might not sound like a big deal, but with a relatively small publisher pool in Australia and an overabundance of talented writers, the Shapcott is vital. Also a lot of fun to enter. This year’s winner, Madeleine Dale, will get to work with the UQP team to bring her collection, ‘The Water-Bearers’ to life on the page, and given the excitement in the judges' commentary, it’s going to be a must-read.
Michael Peterson
Though the Shapcott might be well known, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry is Australia’s only open-aged prize for an Indigenous writer. Named for Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the first Indigenous Australian to publish a book of verse, the award aims to showcase the staggering talent of Indigenous writers at all stages of their career. This award has two categories, the overall winner and an award for the highest placing Quandamooka writer. This year’s overall winner was Adam Brannigan, a Baadi/Walmadjari writer, for his poem ‘The Weather Spirit’, With Tais Rose Wae’s poem ‘Words Not Known At Dawn’ taking out the prize for best Quandamooka writer.
The Val Vallis Award, named for a beloved Queensland poet, seeks out Australia’s best unpublished poem. With a prize of $1,500, the Val Vallis celebrates an overall winner, as well as the highest placing Queensland writer. This year, the overall winner was also Queensland’s highest entry, with the 2022 Shapcott winner, Jarad Bruinstroop, aweing the judges with his piece ‘Fragments On The Myth Of Cy Twombly’. At a close second place, Gayelene Carbis’ ‘What We’re Not Going To Talk About’ looks set to be another must-read.
Jarad Bruinstroop
While traditionally, the XYZ Prize for Spoken Word would also be announced, this year, QPF is announcing the overall winner at an event on Saturday night (22 April). The four (frankly phenomenal) finalists, Huda the Goddess, Sarah Temporal, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, and Boy Renaissance have scored themselves a place in the Literary Lock In Artist Residence, where they’ve collaborated on works that will be performed for the first time before the announcement of the winner.
