We are delighted to announce that the winners of the 2023 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize are:

Winner
Brigid Coleridge for 'Day 210'

Runners-up
Chris Andrews for 'Shedload'
Shey Marque for 'Improbable Acts of Proximity'

Highly Commended
Caroline Reid for 'Rhyming Poem'

This year's judges were Island's poetry editor, Kate Middleton, Jill Jones and Shastra Deo. Each judge read all submissions 'blind', and after much discussion, came to a collective shortlist of ten poems.

The shortlisted poets/poems are …

On the same day that we go to press with our final issue for 2021, we are delighted to be able to announce that Arts Tasmania has awarded us an organisational grant for 2022. This grant gives us a strong foundation from which to pursue our 2022 planned program.

At a time when poetry is very much in the news (thanks to Amanda Gorman reciting her powerful poem at Joe Biden's inauguration), we are delighted to announce the winners of the 2020 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize.

We are delighted to announce that Arts Tasmania has awarded us an organisational grant for 2021. This grant provides us with a solid foundation from which we will pursue the additional revenue necessary to deliver our planned 2021 program.

We are always excited when we publish Island, but perhaps even more so with this next issue. After being unsuccessful in achieving a renewal of multi-year grant funding from Arts Tasmania, it seemed unlikely that the magazine would survive 2019, let alone 2020. But due to an anonymous private benefactor, a matched once-only government grant and some individual donors, we were able to start work on the 2020 publishing schedule (albeit reduced to two issues instead of the normal four). The global pandemic has certainly added some extra challenges, but here we are, about to publish issue 159, the first of our two 2020 issues!

We are delighted to announce that we have finalised the structure of our editor team for 2020.

The future of Island remains very uncertain. Following our unsuccessful application for multi-year funding in the most recent round, at the invitation of Arts Tasmania we have met to identify options for the magazine. These discussions are ongoing, but Arts Tasmania has ruled out the provision of an ad hoc grant.

From the Island team, a heartfelt thanks to all those who have expressed their support, following the announcement that we were unsuccessful in the current Arts Tasmania funding round.