Image by Torrey+Atkin
Jarad Bruinstroop has won the 2023 Queensland Poetry Val Vallis Prize with ‘Fragments on the Myth of Cy Twombly’ (as well as the highest Queensland entry) and Gayelene Carbis wins 2nd prize with ‘What We’re Not Going to Talk About’.
Judges’ comments on Jarad Bruinstroop: Without prior consultation, this poem rose to the top of each of our shortlists; it was unquestionably our winner. An ekphrastic poem oriented across landscape pages, ‘Fragments …’ invites multiple – even fragmented – ways of reading. The result is something more often possible only in visual art: a precise and rich abstraction – not esoteric, but intimately offering many interpretations.
Judges’ comments on Gayelene Carbis: This prose poem drops us in medias res into a living room with the cast of Seinfield blasting through the fourth wall to mediate a fraught mother-daughter relationship. Within the block constraint of the form, the poet alternates very long and very clipped sentences; the effect floats us along a stream of consciousness punctuated by illuminating dialogue.
Zenobia Frost is a writer based in Brisbane. Her most recent poetry collection, After the Demolition (Cordite Books), won the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2020, she edited Art Starts Here, a book on the history of Metro Arts theatre and, in 2021, debuted an interactive installation at Dots+Loops Festival with Timothy Tate.
https://zenfrost.itch.io/
Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet who grew up in the NSW Riverina. His debut collection Regulator was published by Puncher & Wattmann Poetry in 2014. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Best Australian Poems, Southerly, Meanjin, Cordite and on Radio National. He co-judged the 2018 Quantum Words Science Poetry Competition. His second collection Airplane Baby Banana Blanket is forthcoming from Recent Work Press in 2020.
Jarad Bruinstroop is a PhD candidate at QUT. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Overland, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
Gayelene Carbis lives and works on the unceded land of the Boonwurrung people. Gayelene’s recent poetry book,
I Have Decided to Remain Vertical (Puncher & Wattmann) was awarded the Writers’ Choice Award 2025 (Greece). Awards include: Eyelands Poetry Book Award 2024; Highly Commended, NSW Society Women Writers’ Poetry Book Award; Distinguished Favourite, New York City Big Book Award; Finalist - Poetry Book Award (U.K.); and Best Book Award (U.S.). Gayelene’s poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, plays and short films have been widely published and won awards in Australia and overseas. She teaches Creative Writing at Sandybeach and universities and works as a manuscript assessor and writing mentor.
