Wesley Michel Wright Prize
This prize is awarded for an original work of verse or poetry.
Applications for the 2026 Wesley Michel Wright Prize are now open. Please visit the Wesley Michel Wright Prize page here for further information.
2025
Winner
Shey Marque The Hum Hearer
The poems from the winner, Shey Marque, brought together densely allusive lyricism and lively, tactile language to both reflect and challenge ideas of love, genetics, mortality and the cosmos to subtly devastating effect.
Commended
Alan Fyfe G-d, Sleep, and Chaos
Madeleine Dale Portraits of Drowning
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Andy Jackson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Nadia Niaz, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2024
Winner
Jarad Bruinstroop Reliefs
Jarad Bruinstoop’s poems showcase their extraordinary dimension of lyric beauty — not just in the sense of the production of a pleasurable form, but for their capacity to hold and present the irreparability of old and enduring injustices in such a way as to elicit thought.
Commended
Angela Costi Adversarial Practice: Chapbook Series, Cordite Poetry Review
Jeanine Leane Gawimarra: Gathering
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Joe Hughes, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Andy Jackson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2023
Winner
Stuart Barnes Link to the Lark
Extraordinary poems, which draw their forms from across the planet, mix deep history and pop music, personal extremity and sophisticated humour, in such striking and memorable ways that each rereading proves even more rewarding than the last.
Commended
Jill Jones Acrobat Music
Nadia Rhook Second Fleet Baby
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Joe Hughes, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Tyne Sumner, ARC Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2022
Winner
Lisa Gorton Mirabilia
Lisa Gorton’s poems constituted the outstanding entry, making her the winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for 2022. In the end, the poems quality of attentiveness, the range, singularity, and wit of their disjunctive syntheses, their technical control and conceptual vision evince an extraordinary poet working at the height of her powers.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Joe Hughes, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Tyne Sumner, ARC Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2021
Winner
Jill Jones Wild Curious Air
Jill Jones’s work is characterized by its freshness and its originality, its sensitivity to almost imperceptible valences of language, experience and expression. The poems pose difficult questions, but always with a peculiar tenderness that unsettles and gets under the skin. The craft and consideration that infuse these elegant poems is truly impressive — always audacious, they take great risks with tenor and mode, which makes reading them a constant surprise of movement and meaning.
Commended
Evenlyn Araluen Dropbear
Evelyn Araluen writes in a unique, clear voice, at once strong and supple, incisive and with intense feeling. Her poems can turn from anger to tenderness in a moment, canny about their self-positioning and superb formal structuring, but also expressing an alluring unguardedness and vulnerability which fuses personal and political commitments with compressed lyrical splendour. Reading Araluen, we are in the presence of an analytical mind as well as a gifted and perceptive storyteller.
Toby Davidson Four Oceans
Toby Davidson’s extraordinary long poem takes us on an Australian Odyssey across the land, capacious, captivating, attentive simultaneously to the revelatory details of little events and abstract structures, to encounters with a diversity of people and places as well as with the concepts and forces at play in the country today. Davidson presents an impressive range of registers without ever lapsing into pastiche, controlled by an expansive vision. The poem's varied rhythms and manifold vernaculars give the impression of being taken on a ride — through the bush, through formal ingenuity, through epic narrative and through time.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr James Jiang, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Tyne Sumner, ARC Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2020
Winner
Zenobia Frost After the Demolition
Frost’s poems move easily and surprisingly between poignancy and politics, offering striking images of contemporary Australian life — suburban renovations and demolitions, the abject vicissitudes of the rental market — in beautifully handled lines. Witty, incisive, moving without ever becoming maudlin or self-indulgent, Frost’s light touch manages to fuse style, affect, allusion and reference in constantly engaging ways, conveying the shock of experience in a range of forms. Her exceptional control of line and cadence made these poems stand out even in a field of excellent submission, making her the worthy winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for 2020.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr James Jiang, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Associate Professor Amanda Johnson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2019
Winner
Kevin Brophy Look at the Lake
The modest forms taken by these poems are directed towards an astonishing presentation of a sense of place, of country, and the polyphony of voices and events. The attentiveness to tiny details, to the intertwining of place and person and politics, enable the poet to become a medium without voyeurism, committed to the unobtrusive and sensitive labour of recording and transmission.
Commended
Louise Crisp Yuiquimbiang
Crisp’s sequence of poems from 'Yuiquimbiang' draws on a wide range of archival and historical sources, as well as long-standing personal experience of the country, to striking effect. The poems construct an evocative world-scape in layering and relaying the palimpsest of a land in extremis.
Peter Mitchell Conspiracy of Skin
Mitchell’s intense lyric confessional sequence charts the course of his diagnosis and treatment for HIV. The poems are at once detailed, vernacular, and baroque, translating 'the pandemonium of cells' into an affecting story of suffering and survival.
Alison Whittaker BLAKWORK
Whittaker’s uniqueness of voice, which mobilises an Indigenous vernacular and crucial contemporary political issues and contexts, holds through the diversity of these poems. Her blurring of a range of genres, from lyric to emojis, evinces an extraordinary subtlety and scope.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Justine Hyde, Literary Critic and Writer
- Dr Jeanine Leane, Creative Writing, Aboriginal Literature, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2018
Winner
John Kinsella On the Outskirts
Provoked by William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s 'Divine Comedy,' the poems from Kinsella’s 'On the Outskirts' are the stirrings of an exemplary conscience in terms of both their craftsmanship and visionary intensity. In a lyric sequence that spans the distance from 'the winter fogs of Coondle' to the flooded banks of the Neckar, Kinsella preserves moments of grace from the relentless pressures of accumulation, despoliation, and self-delusion that portend environmental catastrophe. Like the blackbirds nesting along the Ammer about which Kinsella writes so memorably, these poems are rowdy, rapturous, agitated, downright territorial, loaded and passionate.
Commended
Sarah Day Towards Light and Other Poems
In her second collection, Sarah Day shows a quiet mastery of poetic form, recalibrating rhythm and rhyme scheme to register the tremors of everyday experience that point to more seismic shifts of feeling, affiliation, and identity. Water and air are the elements from which day composes her visions of light and flight. In her poems, words are restored to their original powers of illumination and elevation.
Michael Farrell I love Poetry
Like the lyrebird in his opening poem, Michael Farrell manages to be the most prodigious of verbal mimics while remaining scrupulously himself. The poems in 'I Love Poetry ' work their mischief through a seamless inadvertency that nevertheless has the reader stitched up by the end. Sharp yet self-effacing, Farrell’s poems make the persuasive case that an appetite for all aspects of contemporary experience may just be a characteristically Australian thing.
Misbah Khokhar Rooftops in Karachi
A composite of poetic fragments in prose, Misbah Khokhar’s 'Rooftops in Karachi ' weaves deftly between fable, memoir, and reportage in evoking the contested zones of home and self in the aftermath of displacement. Juxtaposing childhood transgressions with wartime atrocities, Khokhar’s prose poems explore the precariousness of life under partitions, whether physical, political, or cultural. Poignantly reticent, these fragments are not so much ruins as tokens of survival.
Selection committee
- Professor Tony Birch, Bruce McGuinness Research Fellow, Moondani Balluk Academic Centre
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr James Jiang, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2017
Winner
Suan Fealy Flute of Milk
Extracted from her first full-length poetry collection 'Flute of Milk', Fealy’s poems are at once stylistically unified and formally differentiated. She is capable of combining a great variety of themes with a characteristic subjective intensity. Whether redescribing a Vermeer painting in 'Made in Delft' or compressing environmental ages into brief stanzas in 'Lake Mungo', Fealy handles her material with extraordinary sensitivity. Beautifully poised around moments of art and place, Fealy’s poems evince an exceptional command of lineation and cadence.
Commended
Judy Johnson Dark Convict
Judy Johnson’s poems from her book 'Dark Convicts' reimagine the lives of John Martin and John Randall, two of her African American ancestors who became convicts on the First Fleet. Detailed, concentrated, and moving, this is a gutsy sequence of poems which deals with a difficult topic in an unexpected way, without false pathos, yet powerfully staging emblematic scenes of historical and personal significance.
Bella Li Argosy
The poems from Bella Li’s 'Argosy' are drawn from an exquisite livre composé, inspired by the famous collage novels of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, in which dense series of prose poems are set against rectified historical images of an absorbing strangeness. Near hallucinatory visions are generated from Li’s beautifully-machinated encounters of character and image.
Eddie Paterson Redcated
Eddie Paterson’s 'Redacted ' is a highly lively sequence — punchy, clever, and never less than entertaining. Hip without obnoxiousness, Paterson introduces hilarious and revelatory moments through non-standard punctuations, jump-cuts, and erasures of odd materials sourced from the multimedia noise of the contemporary world.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr James Jiang, English and Theatre Studies. School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Jeanine Leane, Creative Writing, Aboriginal Literature, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2016
Winner
Linda Weste Nothing Sacred
This sequence of poems exhibits an extraordinary subtlety, erudition, range, and vision. Weste revivifies a determining episode from late Republican Rome, in order to present poetically events and characters that resonate uncannily with those of contemporary Australia. The characters are superbly differentiated by modulations of voice, the images and episodes are perfectly chosen and delivered, and the narrative is compelling. The selection committee were particularly impressed by the fact that, despite Weste’s submission being extracts from a verse novel, each of the submitted poems proved compelling in its own right, as well as contributing to the work of the whole. The selection committee unanimously cited the poem ‘Gargantuan' as emblematic of Weste’s mastery.
Commended
Dan Disney Report from a Border
With an incisiveness and imagination that memorably links contemporary experimental poetic techniques with the most pressing of contemporary political concerns, Disney deploys the full gamut of technical typographical variations — font, size, disposition, and allusion, to present a memorable and often shocking intervention. Vulgarity commingles with commandment, repetition with event, to break open the usual public discourses regarding electronic surveillance and border controls.
Ellen van Neerven Comfort Food
These brief but astonishingly powerful poems shift rapidly between striking images ('light catches pink/throats of conflict'), a range of vernaculars, and utterances saturated with the implications and effects of European colonialism in Australia. The only reservation that the selection committee had regarding these poems was that there was not enough of them.
Chole Wilson Not Fox Nor Axe
Wilson’s poems brilliantly accomplish, from within a contemporary tradition of lyric verse, a fusion of seductive imagery with an insight into the sinister aspects of character and history. From the minatory domesticity of 'Tricoteuses', where the domestic character of knitting women encounters the guillotines of Revolutionary Terror, to the title poem which captures the mutation of colonial invasion in Mexico, each poem glitters with concentrated affect.
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Amanda Johnson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Eddie Paterson, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2015
Winner
David Stavanger The Special
Selection committee
- Associate Professor Justin Clemens English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Amanda Johnson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Bridget Vincent, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2014
Winner
Sarah Day Tempo
Sarah Day’s meticulously-crafted lyrics move with a quicksilver ease across time and place, between myth and reality, from the personal to the world-historical. Her invocations of ancient cities, celestial mechanics, oceanic flows, old paintings and domestic cooking are magisterially coaxed — to use one of her own metaphors, like ‘melody from wood and gut’. Day’s handling of memorable juxtapositions is subtle and striking. A rooster confronts a jumbo jet, and a dead dog and antique fresco, while too-carefully manufactured plantations are shown to ‘breathe death in life.’ The poems are at once sensuous and metaphysical, affective meditations upon the deadly paradoxes of time.
Commended
Niki Kolouris The sea with no one in it
Niki Kolouris' poems take up the contemporary challenges of environmentalism and ekphrasis — poems about other kinds of artifice, including statuary and Stelarc, in a global frame. Her pithy, often punchy poems mix the sentimental with the acerbic, Alpine cigarettes with ‘Lolly Gobble Bliss Bomb bliss’. Above all, Koulouris’s topic is the sea that ‘never closes/unlike the sun’, with all its mutability and absoluteness.
Cameron Lowe Circle Work
Cameron Lowe's well-wrought lyrics combine an ear and eye for the imagistic vernacular of his Geelong locality, with a deep absorption in modernist poetic forms. His unique integration of locale and technique is evident in the light touch of his lines, in which we read of ‘that nimble animal the fish, darting, flickering as shadow over sand, out of which/is drawn no allusion.'
Bella Li Maps, Cargo
Bella Li's prose poems take us on brief yet extraordinary adventures of real and virtual empires, sometimes drawing on precise historical details, sometimes treating the materials with restrained formal experimentation. She has an eye for strong images, such as the deer that ‘ran quite a distance with his heart cut in two’, as well as for effective grammatical surprises.
Selection committee
- Dr Amy Brown, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Amanda Johnson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
2013
Winner
Judy Johnson Stone Scar Air Water
Johnson’s beautiful sequence focusing on Irish localities was not only deeply attentive to the specificities of place, evoking ‘shards of stone the size of a premature baby’s fists’ and ‘many skins / of effervescent light’, but also the metaphysical resonances of those encounters. Johnson joins again the list of eminent poets awarded this prestigious prize, having already won in 2000 with work which became Nomadic.
Selection committee
- Dr Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies,School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Bridget Vincent, McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Sara Wills, Coordinator, Executive Master of Arts, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences
2012
Winner
Amanda Johnson The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street
Johnson’s sequence with its brilliant overall conception and wit, evident in her image juxtaposition and voice, was declared the winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for 2012. Taking flight with devastating wit and imaginative verve, Johnson’s range of acutely eco-political bird poems, plucks the laughter nerve only to trigger terror — ‘The trick is to get them flying consistently at 18km per hour; then to alight on enemy windowsills; and sing folk still'. An outstanding winner, from an outstanding field.
Selection committee
- Dr Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Marian Campbell, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Sara Wills, Senior Lecturer, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts
2011
Winner
Rosanna Licari An Absence of Saints
The standard of this year’s Wesley Michel Wright Prize was exceptionally high. The selection committee found it extremely difficult to rank works of such standard, but decided that Rosanna Licari should receive the prize for her stunning poems, which were delightfully succinct, exhibited great poise in their diction, were often humorous, and had an affective power without sentimentality.
Selection committee
- Dr Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Marian Campbell, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Sara Wills, Discipline Chair, Australian Studies, School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Arts
2010
Winner
Anna Nicholson Possession
Anna Nicholson’s 'Possession' shows a nuanced attentiveness to grand historical narratives. At once subversive and delicate, the collection evinces admirable subtlety and power. Tight, consistent, strong, these poems are evidence of Nicholson’s craft.
Selection committee
- Dr Justin Clemens, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
- Dr Amanda Johnson, Creative Writing, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts