Aural Events: Best of Australian Poetry

Sara M Saleh is a human rights activist and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, living on Gadigal land. A poet and writer, her pieces have been published in English and Arabic in various national and international outlets and anthologies including Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland Journal, and Rabbit Poetry.

She is co-editor of the 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. Sara is the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. She is currently developing her debut novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living, as a recipient of the inaugural Affirm Press Mentorship for Sweatshop Western Sydney.

John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016), Open Door (UWAP, 2018), Insomnia (WW Norton, 2020) and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). University of Western Australian Press will be publishing his Collected Poems 1980-2021 in three volumes, with the first volume being released in early 2022.

John’s volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015) and Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021). His recent novels include Lucida Intervalla (Dalkey Archive, 2019) and Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017).

John’s new memoir is Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. He lives with his family in wheatbelt Western Australia and is an anarchist vegan pacifist and environmentalist of long standing.

Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and critic. She has received the 2021 Kat Muscat Fellowship and a 2020-21 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship to work on an autotheoretical book about her experience as a refugee, the Bosnian war, identity, memory and un/belonging.

Her writing has appeared in Cordite, Overland, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Australian Poetry Journal, the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Rabbit and others.

Yeena is a Wiradjuri poet who grew up in Central West New South Wales and she now lives and works on Wangal, Darug and Gadigal lands. Her work has been published in several literary journals.

Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. Recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award, and Viva the Real, shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award.

In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety, and in 2003 the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems. Her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, won the 1993 Mary Gilmore Award. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally and has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. She has been an academic for a number of years, but has also worked as an arts administrator, journalist and book editor.

Rico Craig is a writer, educator and award-winning poet whose work melds the narrative, lyrical and cinematic. His poetry has been awarded prizes or shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize, Val Vallis Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize, Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize and University of Canberra Poetry Prize. Bone Ink (UWAP), his first poetry collection, was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018.

Since 2012 he has worked as Storyteller-in-Chief at the Story Factory, designing and facilitating creative writing programs for young people, and teacher development programs for adults. Our Tongues Are Songs, his second collection of poetry, was published in 2021 by Recent Work Press. 

Ouyang Yu is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, won the 2004 South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. His third novel, The English Class, won the 2011 NSW ...

Judith Nangala Crispin is a visual artist and poet, and a descendant of Bpangerang-Gunaikurnai people from the Murray River. Her work centres on lost history and dispossession, as well as relationship-building with Country. Judith has published a collection of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), and a book of images and poems, The Lumen Seed (Daylight Books, 2017).

Judith is Musica Viva’s 2021 Artist in Residence and a member of Oculi Collective. She is currently working on her illustrated verse novel, The Dingo’s Noctuary, which she hopes to finish before the next worldwide pandemic in 100 years.

Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing and English Literature, First Class Honours and a University Medal in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in Writing, Editing and Publishing, and recently submitted her PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland.

Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Shastra's second book, The Exclusion Zone, is forthcoming from University of Queensland Press in 2023.

Manisha Anjali is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024). She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha was a recipient of BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency ...

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award ...

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and editor-at-large for Australian Poetry. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, Sydney Spleen (Giramondo 2021). With Ellen van Neerven, he co-edited Best of Australian Poems Vol 1 2021.