Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2018

By and | 20 September 2018

Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2018 Selection panel: Alison Whittaker and Angela Gardner.

Winner

‘Reality On-demand’, was selected because it was too muscular to ignore, conveyed with a technical skill that denied us breath. It holds a mirror to the construction of increasingly curated forms of reality through media, without flinching. It asks, ‘What will we make of this?’, tackles our insatiable search for the real from home renovation dramas and cooking competitions to the ersatz confection of dating shows and wrestles it to the ground.

Runner up

We would also like to congratulate the second prize winner, for his poem ‘What We Know About Her’, Damen O’Brien. His poem, through a trail of sensitive, yet pedestrian, data and records, is a chilling mosaic of ourselves in surveillance societies.

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Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet.

More by Alison Whittaker on Cordite Poetry Review →
Angela Gardner's verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette published by Shearsman Books, is a UK National Poetry Day recommendation for 2021. Poems from it have been anthologised in The Forward Prize 2022 and Live Canon International Poetry Prize 2019. Recent poems have been published in The Yale Review and West Branch, USA; Blackbox Manifold and The Long Poem, UK; Plumwood Mountain and Southerly, Australia. She lives in Ireland.

http://light-trap.blogspot.com/

More by Angela Gardner on Cordite Poetry Review →

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