Blake Poetry Prize: Exploring the Religious and Spiritual Through Poetry

Presented by the NSW Writers’ Centre and the Blake Society, the $5,000 Prize is named for visionary artist and poet William Blake, and was established to give Australian poets new possibilities to explore religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century. The Prize is blind judged, and more information about the Judges can be found below.

The 2013 Blake Poetry Prize Shortlist

Almost Pause: Pareidolia by Amanda Joy
Appellations by Anthony Lawrence
Ars Moriendi by Chloe Wilson
Grand Final by Jennifer Harrison
Nocturne by Anthony Lawrence
The Pines by Anthony Lawrence
Prayer Quick & Dirty by Lizz Murphy
River Lines by Ross Gillett
The Quality of Light by Christine Paice

The winner and highly commended poems will be announced on Thursday 17 October.

Read the Judges’ comments here.

The 2013 judges

Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s leading poets. He has written 20 books, mostly collections of poetry but also a few autobiographies. His work has been translated into several languages and is internationally published. He won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2011. Adamson on the prize: “Of all the prizes for poetry the Blake is the one, like its namesake, it stands for something more than its generous bounty. It vibrates with Blake’s unique vision”.

Michelle Cahill is the author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks and the co-editor of Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and received the Val Vallis Award. She edits Mascara Literary Review. In 2013 she is the CAL/UOW International Poetry Fellow at Kingston University, London.

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet who was born in Singapore. In 2010 she won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship and was the Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012. Her first collection of poems, Burning Rice, was published in the New Voices Series 2012 by Australian Poetry. The book was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2012 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2013.