Dimitra Harvey has won the 2021 Queensland Poetry Val Vallis Prize with ‘Cicadas’; Dan Hogan wins second prize with ‘How_to_be_the_best_worker_in_the_world.ppt’ and Damen O’Brien wins the Highest Queensland entry for ‘What’s Wrong With the Date?’.
Dimitra Harvey
Rich in imagery that is both vividly real and subtly symbolic, ‘Cicadas’ is a lyrical meditation on mortality, transformation and sustenance. Its close observations – of insects, love, gardening, death and food – accumulate and deepen with each reading. An insightful, restrained and expansive poem.
Dan Hogan
The poem is driven by an experimental edginess, wildly creative wit, and is informed by a voice that is both incendiary and vibrant. Its form functions as rupture, embedded in it both an unfailing attentiveness and an absurdity impossible to ignore.
Damen O’Brien
This run-on poem does not permit the reader to come up for air but rather compels us to confront ongoing Australian un-history captured in layer upon evocative layer, its frenzied rhetorical questions belie a steadiness gripping us and keeping us beholden long after reading.
Sara M Saleh is a writer, poet of Palestinian, Egyptian, and Lebanese heritage, who has shared her work on stages from Brooklyn to Bangalore. Her work has been published in English and Arabic across dozens of literary platforms, and she has led workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals around the world. Sara’s debut novel,
Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm, 2023), and her poetry collection,
The Flirtation of Girls (UQP, 2023), have received multiple prizes and shortlistings between them, and she has been awarded various honours over the years. Sara made history in Australia as the first poet to win both the prestigious Peter Porter and the Judith Wright Poetry Prizes (2020-21).
Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. His latest poetry collection
Human Looking won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Andy's poems are included in the anthologies
Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2025) and
Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, USA, 2026). He is a co-editor of
Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability (Puncher & Wattman 2024), and he writes and rests on Dja Dja Wurrung country.
http://amongtheregulars.wordpress.com/
