Australian Book Review (ABR) has announced Amanda Joy as the winner of 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her poem Tailings.
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is one of Australia’s most lucrative and respected awards for poetry. It honours the life and work of the great Australian poet, Peter Porter (1929 – 2010), an honoured contributor to ABR for many years.
Selected from a field of around 730 poems, Morag Fraser named Amanda Joy as the overall winner at a ceremony in the ABR office earlier today at the Boyd Community Hub, Southbank.
In their report, the judges (Luke Davies, Lisa Gorton, and Kate Middleton) said “Tailings is a poem remarkable for its close-woven language, everywhere charged with vivid details; and, at the same time, remarkable for its open and wide-ranging attentiveness.”
“In Tailings the poet nowhere sets place at an aesthetic distance but everywhere attends to its mess and profligacy, a mode of perception alive to the hunger of animals.”
Amanda Joy is a poet and visual artist living in Fremantle, Western Australia. She has written two poetry chapbooks, Orchid Poems (Mulla Mulla Press) and Not Enough to Fold (Verve Bath Press, USA). Her poems have been included in journals and anthologies, including The Best of Australian Poems, Regime, and Toronto Quarterly. She is also a selector for Creatrix Haiku Journal.
Amanda receives $5,000, as well as an Arthur Boyd etching and aquatint, The unicorn and the angel (1975) from the series, The lady and the unicorn (1975) – donated by Ivan Durrant in memory of Georges Mora.
The other shortlisted poets were: Dan Disney – …a passing shower? (18 aphorisms verging on a narrative); Anne Elvey – Prelude to a Voice; Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet – Rage to order; and Campbell Thomson – Lament for ‘Cape’ Kennedy. Each will receive $625.
For more information about the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, to read the complete Judges’ report, or to read the 2016 shortlisted poems, visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au for details.
Image: ABR Editor Peter Rose with Amanda Joy – courtesy of ABR