Paul Collis

Paul Collis is a Barkindji person from Bourke, on the Darling River in north-west New South Wales. His novel Dancing Home was the winner of the 2016 David Unaipon Award, and was published in 2017 by the University of Queensland Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Canberra, where he earned a PhD in Communications.

Author's books

Wita Witalana by Paul Collis
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Wita Witalana (look out over)

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Winner of the ACT Literary Award for Poetry 2026

Wita Witalana (look out over), Paul Collis’ second collection of poetry, deliberately inhabits space where history is written on the person. But it is a history deeper than, and in contest with, any idea of ‘Australia’. Collis asks us not only to see the effects of colonialism on a people, but to experience those effects as someone thrown into its brutal shadows. It mourns old ways of being, the loss of connection with country, and the loss of family and friends while offering a powerful meditation on the complexities of Indigenous life in contemporary Australia. These poems resonate with a deep sense of longing, memory, and the enduring strength of connection to land and culture. They are a powerful call to listen to messages carried through the trees, and a reminder of the stories etched within the Australian soil.

‘The searing ‘Barkindji’ voice reminds us that so much remains unreconciled in the depravity of colonialism-crimson brush strokes on tarnished Dreaming.’
Samuel Wagan Watson

 

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Nightmares run like mercury by Paul Collis
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Nightmares Run Like Mercury

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From the author of the David Unaipon award winning novel Dancing Home.

Paul Collis’ first collection of poetry is a book of difficult truths and profound connections. It charts a life lived on the streets, on country, in the deep time of tradition, of relationships to land and family. This book mourns those who have passed, and the current state of places and people held close in the heart and in the kinds of knowledge inseparable from self that might be called ‘being’, but is always much more than that. It is also a poetry of hope in the hopeless, of beauty in small moments, and the overwhelming ‘now’ that is memory.

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Story Ground: The anthology

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Story Ground is a place of story, of attentiveness and support. A place where stories are held  safely and dearly, and are shared bravely—the very foundation of Community and Culture.

Story Ground: The anthology is a collection of prose writing, poetry and storytelling deriving from a series of workshops based on traditional Indigenous practices of storytelling and knowledge. The authors come from far flung places. Their writings here are breathtakingly powerful. This anthology is for the keeping and for returning to—a collection that you will find yourself reading and embracing, time and again.

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