2024 South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Awards
Jen Saunders wins the 2024 South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Awards
Poet, painter and musician Jen Saunders wins the prestigious 2024 South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award with her poem ‘A Kiting of Spiders’.
Announced on Saturday 15 June at the Wollongong Art Gallery, this year’s judge Judith Beveridge described the poem as “elegant.”
“The poem is set in motion by artful weavings of images of spider webs blowing over house and landscape. The webs become metaphors of wonder and connection, joining together past and present, memory and reflection, they bring the non-human and the human into careful balance. The lines are skilfully orchestrated and demonstrate skilful control of form. The tonal modulations, coupled with a penetrating focus of image and diction, create lingering resonances.”
Jen Saunders reads ‘A Kiting of Spiders’. Photos by Matt Houston, Ironbark Photography.
Runner-up this year was Greg McLaren with ‘Regent honeyeater’, a clever elegiac poem for a highly endangered species that “…moves quietly yet assuredly.” Its theme grows with intensity as the poem progresses. The poem achieves an impressive intimate shaping of language and voice.
Rosa O’Kane won the Wollongong Art Gallery Prize for her poem ‘On Slack Water’, a work in response to Illawarra sculptor and artist Ian Gentle’s sculpture ‘Dagg in Duckboat’ which featured in the Wollongong Art Gallery exhibition of the sculptor’s work earlier this year. The poem impressed, said Judith Beveridge, for its “elegantly sustained imagery and phrasing across the lines. The syntax at all times achieves admirable impetus, lingering resonances and tonal shifts. The poem has a lyrical intensity and this, along with its powerful rhythmical force, holds and commands the reader’s attention.”
And the Ron Pretty South Coast Writers Centre Members award went to Indigenous poet, writer and playwright Julie Janson for her poem ‘to cliffs we come’. Combining Dharawal and English language, the poem addresses colonial and natural themes and points to the tensions between cultures.
In the general category two poems were highly commended: South Australian poet Ez Knill for their poem ‘girl & best friend.’ and Alisha Brown for her poem ‘After my friend died, I took her to the aquarium’.
Highly commended in the Wollongong Art Gallery Prize were ‘At Rest’ by Lili Pâquet and ‘Fiddler Crab Sonnet’ by Eden Crain.
The winners were selected from 218 entries received this year, a significant increase over last year’s competition of 150 entries which attests to the increasing respect and popularity of the prize. Of these, 15 poems were shortlisted. All shortlisted poems will be published in the 2025 South Coast Writers Centre Anthology of Writing.
Dr Sarah Nicholson, Director of the South Coast Writers Centre, congratulated all the winners and highly commended poets. “It’s great to see such diversity across the competition,” Dr Nicholson said.
We are delighted with the increase and look forward to an even stronger field in next year’s competition…
You can listen to some of the shortlisted poems in our brand-new Listening Lounge.
Image: Ian Gentle, 1945–2009, Dagg in Duckboat, 1997, eucalypt wood, 207.0 x 237.0 x 3.0 cm. Collection Wollongong Art Gallery, Gift of the artist, 1997. Photograph Bernie Fischer.
