Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2024 winners

This year's Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize judges were Island's poetry editor, Kate Middleton, Esther Ottaway and Eileen Chong. We received close to 500 poems. Each judge read all submissions 'blind', and came to a collective shortlist of ten poems before selecting the winner and two runners-up.

Congratulations to the following poets: 

Winner
Yasmin Smith for ‘The Burial Feathers’ 

Runners-up
Emilie Collyer for ‘Lateral ambling gait’
Helen Jarvis for ‘and’

Kate said of this year's winners: The winning poem “The Burial Feathers” by Yasmin Smith addresses loss, ritual and belonging as it situates itself in the memory of a landscape left behind and the reality of a new landscape. The poem unfolds a narrative amid “the swell of the funeral parlour” that is always clear and yet the language gathers richness and density in its culmination. Emilie Collyer’s “Lateral ambling gait” is a clear-eyed poem that weaves multiple stories of mortality together in a manner that is urgent and unyielding, accomplished and understated. Helen Jarvis’s “and” uses its form to brilliant effect. The poem takes the reader on a drive through varied landscapes and through the years, both of the speaker’s life and “down five centuries” of punch-cutter’s work, accumulating detail that shows how “Life finds/ ways to commit to you”.  

The winner, runners-up and other shortlisted poems will be published in Island 170, out on 21 March, to coincide with World Poetry Day. You can pre-order your copy now, or subscribe here. 

Proudly supported by the Hobart Bookshop