Meet our incoming Poetry Editor

We are thrilled to introduce our new Poetry Editor, Tim Loveday.

Tim is a poet, writer and baby academic living on Wurundjeri country. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2025 DHA, 2024 Montreal Poetry Prize, 2024 Big Australian Yarn, and 2023 David Harold Tribe Prize. 

Tim said "I’ve long admired the poetry that Island publishes. Thank you to outgoing editor Kate Middleton, who has fostered a poetics of the body, a poetics of comprehension and sincerity—a political and lyric poetry that has championed female and First Nations voices alongside discourses on environmentalism and climate collapse.

I cherish the opportunity to continue this legacy as the new poetry editor, while aiming to take Island’s poetry in a slightly new direction by seeking out works of narrative poetry, collaborative poetry, funny poetry, poetry of the digital age, response poetry. This feels like an extraordinary chance to be a part of so-called Australian poetry at a time when our poetry is more alive than ever. See the world-class poets that are springing up all over this continent. See the huge advent of poetry gigs. See the poet laureate. See the intersections of poetry and activism, our poets at the forefront of talking back. Despite the ongoing obstacles of funding, we’re flourishing. We’re here. We’re making you cry-laugh-snort in the same breath that we’re holding the bastards to account. And this is the sort of poetry I want to see: poetry that’s attuned to our times.

I’ve always said don’t trust a poet, but I’m so thankful Jane Rawson and the Island team have found it in their hearts to do so. I’ll need to write a little poem to explain the inexplicable joy you’ve all given me.”

Tim will be a judge for the 2026 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, before stepping into the role of Poetry Editor, from issue 178.