2025 SCWC Poetry Award Winners
Jenny Pollak wins the 2025 SCWC Poetry Award
Jenny Pollak wins the 2025 SCWC Poetry Award. Photography by Tyneesha Williams.
Last weekend, the winners of the 2025 South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award were announced at a Wollongong Art Gallery event.
Poet and artist Jenny Pollak won the prestigious overall prize from over two hundred entries, for her poem ‘Cotton / wool’. Judge Judith Beveridge described the poem as “elegantly composed … each image giving rise to another in an energetic yet thoughtful weaving of the associative elements of cotton.
“The personal, the historical and the political are skilfully layered. The poem’s tonal shifts and resonant images command attention as do its intimate shaping of diction and voice.”
This year’s runner-up was Vuong Pham with ‘Conversion Haibun’, “a poem with its own unique terrain … its language powerful and resonant.”
The Wollongong Art Gallery Prize was won this year by Moira Kirkwood and her poem ‘Thinking makes it so’, in response to Ann Thomson’s Untitled, 1986.
The Ron Pretty SCWC Members Prize was awarded to Kai Jensen for ‘Morphology’.
Highly commended for this year’s Poetry Award were ‘Conditions for Metamorphosis’ by Alisha Brown, who also achieved a Highly Commended in 2024, and ‘Aquaplaning’ by Mark Finn.
L to R: Kai Jensen, Moira Kirkwood, judge Judith Beveridge, and Jenny Pollak.
Prize winners with SCWC Director Dr Sarah Nicholson and SCWC Chair Peter Frankis.
This year’s competition was again judged by esteemed poet Judith Beveridge, winner of the 2023 ACU Prize for Poetry. Judith’s latest collection of poetry, Tintinnabulum, is published by Giramondo Press.
The 2025 SCWC Poetry Award was run in conjunction with the Wollongong Art Gallery exhibition ‘Shape Shifter’, an innovative retrospective of Australian collage. 234 poems were submitted to the competition, an increase over last year’s 218 entries, attesting to the growing respect and popularity of the prize.
All 14 shortlisted poems will be published in the 2026 SCWC Anthology of Writing. You can listen to some of this year’s shortlisted poems on our Listening Lounge.
Image: Michael Butler, Are You Being Served?, 2007, collage, pen on board. 40(h) x 84.2(w) cm. Private Collection. Photograph Jennifer Leahy.
