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 is an award-winning writer of poetry, prose and plays. Her first book of poetry, Anecdotal Evidence (Five Islands Press) was Finalist in the 2019 International Book Awards for Poetry, sponsored by American Book Fest. Other recent shortlistings/prizes include: MPU International Poetry Prize; Best Small Fiction; My Brother Jack Poetry and Short Story Prizes (awarded Third Prizes); ABR, The Age and various short story, poetry, short film/playwriting awards. She has read her work in Melbourne and overseas; and teaches Creative Writing at various universities, and English as an Additional Language (EAL) at ACU and Fitzroy Learning Network.
