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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

The kool-aid  of The Kool-Aid Dispenser stands for any number of things: grief, enduring institutionalized foolery, either the nonsense of handed-down beliefs, or their denial. And, backwards, it is about the power of language to discover and surprise us. The Kool-Aid Dispenser contains poems of loss, balanced by many poems that celebrate renewal and hope. The elegies which make up the first section move from the personal to the universal, concluding with a touching tribute to Musgrave’s friend, the late poet Jordie Albiston.  The book’s last section, ‘Koels to Newcastle’, deals with the local and the domestic, yet as with the whole of the book, these are always placed squarely in relation to larger contexts through tensile and energetic lines which impel language towards being alive to the world.

The poems in this collection were written over the past few years in various locations: riverbanks; hospital corridors; writers retreats; oceans; in the leaf litter photographing fungi; by the fire with my two dogs; hotel rooms on business trips. I am inspired by all the poets that have walked beside me and have written words to fuel the fires for positive change and peace. Yellow Tailed Black cockatoos have just flown over and, as always, I run to catch a glimpse. My dogs have learnt their cry and join me on the back deck. These birds often arrive marking key episodes in my life, including this last piece of writing for this collection. Makarra is reflected in my poems, rain nourishes my words, water cleanses my thoughts and refreshes the path of the life journey ahead of me.

Winner ACT Literary Awards 2025
Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2025
Shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award 2025
Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award 2025
Highly Commended in the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

In this, his sixth full-sized collection, published exactly 30 years after his first collection, The Wolf Problem in Australia back in 1994, Paul Cliff explores the themes of Faith, Grace, Hope, Devotion—Fragility, Responsibility—Privilege, Relegation, Betrayal & Loss—in multifarious aspects across an array of personal and historical situations. Subjects range from the title poem’s prayer-flags flying in the family back garden, to the respectful approach to playing piano, considerations of the plight of zoo animals during the Battle for Berlin, the demise of an old Pilot Station; the latter-day disinterring of bodies from the Franklin Expedition, and the musings of a seventeenth-century Inquisitor investigating ‘possessed’ nunneries. There are wry and/or beautiful takes on crocodiles, blue tongue lizards, the thylacine, quolls and whippets, along with an array of sonnets, and two ironic bucolics contemplating degradation of the Darling River and fancifully reconstructing Burke & Wills.

‘This debut volume by Asha is crammed with rich and richly surprising poems, all of them characterised by sharp-edged observation, vivid images, and many a quirky turn of phrase. These poems take all that is familiar about lyric poetry, and lift it to a new plane of operation, in voice and presence, shifts of tone, close critique, and unexpected twists of humour. And whether the poems are about overwatering plants, anticipating another war, or sex parties held by cockroaches, they are infused with ethical sensibility, and always generous encounters with the perplexing things that come at one in everyday life.’
Jen Webb

In Dublin Wandering, Nathanael O’Reilly rearranges, remixes and recombines words and phrases from James Joyce’s Ulysses into eighteen poems, each named for the corresponding episodes in Joyce’s novel. Dublin Wandering is a surrealist work inspired by modernist techniques and philosophies, created as a homage to Joyce’s masterpiece and Dublin.

I missed it, the entire history of our blue world.

How many heads rolled? Did they go defiantly?

I will sacrifice myself by becoming an automaton.

It is all too much! The past and future have coalesced into a spherical twister of succulents, stardust, money boxes and chatbots. You keep it together with outstretched arms, a child of this earth wielding a hurricane. All that is you whirling about in the mix: erotic books and bull ants, blackbirds and stoic philosophers. The whole world caught in a balancing act of blue whales and human brains, super computers and microplastics. As a matter of survival, you start bringing it together, moulding it firmly into the density of a dark star. A volatile idea pushed heavily inward, until it takes shape in your clamped hands. When you take a look, there is an ancient fruit – an apricot, with a modest blush. It is exquisite! But if you plant it, what will grow? If you eat it, what will you become?

This collection traces the period from 2019, and the catastrophe fires in Australia, through the COVID years and beyond, feeling its way into how we live in the world, and how we might reflect on the value of listening to the many voices that make up our everyday experience. Written primarily in prose poetry, it attempts to expand the capacity of the sentence, rather than the line, to gesture toward what is rarely said (or cannot be said), and to offer fragments of stories about finding a home in the world as it is, and as we are.  

Shortlisted for the ACT Literary Awards 2025