Newcastle Poetry Prize shortlist announced

The Hunter Writers’ Centre has announced the 2025 shortlist for the $15,000 Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Shortlisted poets are:

• Ann-Marie Blanchard for “Medea with the Graceful Feet”
• Owen Bullock for “Systolic”
• Mitch Cave for “Against the Shore and Ascending”
• Luoyang Chen for “Growing Vegetables”
• Eva Collins for “Warsaw 1953”
• Emilie Collyer for “my mother walks every day up a hill”
• Emilie Collyer for “I Have Been Running All My Life”
• Angela Costi for “A Revised History of Embroidery”
• Duc Dau for “Broken Vietnamese: Sonnet Sequence”
• Bradley Visaka David for “endeavour hill aunties”
• Aloma Davis for “Susurrance”
• Michael Farrell for “Doppelgangers Are Over”
• Nigel Featherstone for “Inconvenience”
• Alan Fyfe for “The Wire Tied Sky”
• Ross Gillett for “Shelving”
• Kailum Graves for “Anatomically Modern Human: Patch Notes”
• Jennifer Harrison for “Noah’s Arc”
• Perrie Holden for “Driving By Cows”
• Gershon Maller for “Cleave Orchis”
• Shey Marque for “Little Book of Songs”
• Greg McLaren for “Late Sonnets”
• Peter Mitchell for “Sequence — ‘Harrowing Climates’”
• Omar Musa for “There Is No Word For Bipolar”
• Damen O’Brien for “Holes”
• Edie Popper for “On Kafka & Cardiac Surgery”
• Ann Shenfield for “The Waiting Room”
• Ed Southorn for “Hyphae”
• Jo Withers for “On My Watch”
• Vaughan Yager for “90”
• Gavin Yuan Gao for “Dear Apparition”.

The winner is set to be announced during the Newcastle Writers Festival on 28 March 2026. Each of the shortlisted poems will be included in the annual Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, which will be launched at the announcement.

Last year’s winner was Christopher (Kit) Kelen for “Dombóvár”.

More information is available on the Hunter Writers’ Centre website.

Category: Awards Local news