Leane wins 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award
Jeanine Leane has won the University of Sydney’s 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award, worth $20,000.
Leane’s poem ‘Water under the bridge’ was chosen from a record of 522 poems, and a shortlist of seven, which also included:
- ‘Collections: a catalogue’ by Anne Elvey
- ‘By a drowned valley estuary: three tracings’ by Jake Goetz
- ‘Open corpuscles of soil’ by Daniel Holmes
- ‘[e]state[ment]’ by Tim Loveday
- ‘Poetry’ by Gareth Morgan
- ‘Passing Time’ by Dominic Symes.
Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, teacher and academic from southwest New South Wales, who has completed a doctorate in Australian literature and Aboriginal representation and currently lectures at the University of Melbourne.
Leane said the David Harold Tribe Award inspired her to experiment with a longer lyric narrative piece to tell a story through a poem. ‘It’s a tremendous honour to win this prize, which is generous in the space it offers poets to tell their stories and the prize money offered in recognition of the power of poetry to tell a story. “Water under the bridge” lays bare the intergenerational traumas and ongoing resilience of Aboriginal women through a nonfiction narrative poem that was both difficult and cathartic to write. Thank you for recognising this important and under-told story of First Nations experience and ever-present history.’
Presented by the Discipline of English in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award is the richest poetry prize in Australia, offering $20,000 for an original unpublished poem on any theme, up to 100 lines in length. The David Harold Tribe awards program rotates across the categories of fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture and symphony, with the poetry award held every five years ‘to encourage interest and excellence in poetry’.
The judges of the 2023 award were Toby Fitch, Ellen van Neerven and John Kinsella. Fitch said the seven shortlisted poems ‘represent a snapshot of the varied and urgent poetry currently being written in Australia’. The judges praised ‘Water under the bridge’ as a taut, layered and lyrical poem about legacy and inheritance. ‘Its tracing of the intergenerational narratives and traumas of Indigenous women and a particular kind of racial discrimination—not appearing Black enough—is rendered poignant and aching by the total control over line and word,’ said the judges.
The winner was announced at an event at the University of Sydney on Friday, 6 October.
Picture credit: Peter Comisari
Category: Awards Local news
