Aitken wins 2021 Patrick White Award

Poet Adam Aitken is the winner of this year’s $15,000 Patrick White Award.

Aitken is the author of several books of poetry including Archipelago (Vagabond Press), shortlisted in 2018 for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry, and the 2016 autobiography 100 Letters Home (Vagabond Press), which was longlisted for the 2017 ALS Gold Medal. He was also co-editor of the 2013 anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann).

On winning this year’s Patrick White Award Aitken told the Age: ‘It makes me feel a lot more confident. After my first book was published in 1985, I didn’t write for 10 years afterwards; I couldn’t repeat the momentum.

‘I am very grateful to my comrades and colleagues who have devoted their lives to poetry. And I hope it keeps the people who pick up my work and publish the poems going.’

Aitken’s forthcoming collection Revenants will be published by Giramondo in February 2022.

Patrick White established the annual literary award using the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. The award, for authors who ‘have made a significant but inadequately recognised contribution to Australian literature’, does not involve a submission process.

The winner of last year’s Patrick White Award was novelist Gregory Day.

Category: Awards Local news