Blake Poetry Prize 2026 winner announced

Chen Wang has won the 69th Blake Poetry Prize, worth $5000, for his poem “The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting”.

Chen Wang is a Melbourne-based medical student whose writing explores migration, memory and the spiritual dimensions of trauma and healing. He came to Australia from China when he was 11 years old. “The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting”, a narrative poem in 10 short sections, “continues his interest in how stories survive within systems that struggle to understand them”, according to the Prize website.

The judges commented: “The artistry of the poem emerges from the clash of a medical world with the woman’s grief over the killing of her son in the Middle East, of a science-based hospital-world with her deeply held religious beliefs, of her powerfully expressed spiritual longing with an interpreter who must make nurses understand what she is saying.”

This year, two poets were highly commended: Adrienne Eberhard for “Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington” and Vuong Pham for “Father”.

Presented by WestWords and Liverpool Powerhouse, the Blake Poetry Prize is an open poetry prize that “challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief”.

Chen Wang was chosen as the winner by judges Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Kevin Brophy and Coco X Huang, from a shortlist announced in April. More information about the award is on the WestWords website.

Category: Awards Local news