‘Never predictable or dull’

Carol was an excellent commentator on poetry, shrewd and deep-thinking but able to express her thoughts in plain English rather than academic jargon. Her taste in poems was eclectic and very original; one didn’t always share it, but it was never predictable or dull. Sheenagh Pugh, Shetland

‘Carol made Mondays something to look forward to’

Looking out for Carol Rumens’ poem of the week made Mondays something to look forward to. It was a weekly fixture to break off for a few minutes at some point in the day and be introduced to something or someone I inevitably didn’t know, but was glad to meet. I’ve been checking the culture section weekly since her last column and hoping Carol was enjoying a holiday somewhere. So I’m sad to hear we won’t be getting the benefit of her generous insights again, but what an archive to have left us. Thank you Carol. Anonymous

Carol was good enough to choose my poem, Material Culture, as a poem of the week in 2015. Not only did she give it an acute introduction – probably better than it deserved – she also was a sympathetic ear when the, shall we say, rather snarky comments rolled in below the line from the Guardian’s famous poetry reading public! Her kindness to me as well as the Guardian column led me to her own poetry, which is very fine. I’m surprised that she was 81: she seemed much younger. David Ward, retired poet, Virginia

‘She lit the way for female poets’

I took workshops with Carol in University College Cork in the 1990s and she was an inspiration. Always very grateful for her support of my work and many other poets – and as a way-lighter for female poets – whose work I admire, and for her insight into poetry through the Guardian column. One of a kind. She will be much missed. Anonymous

‘A tremendous poet, cosmopolitan humanist, inspiring mentor and friend’

Carol was always politically relevant, always promoted poetry as a vital, nuanced, informed and emotionally intelligent discourse about world events. I’ll be for ever grateful for her attention to my work in the column and am glad I could help publish her work as well. Rest in poetry, Carol Rumens – tremendous poet, sparkling, generous, cosmopolitan humanist and my wonderful, inspiring mentor and friend. My deepest sympathies to Carol’s family and all her loved ones. Naomi Foyle, Chichester

‘She had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic’

How much of a loss Carol Rumens is to us poets and to the Guardian. I’m shocked by her sudden death (she used two of my poems in the column within the last 18 months). She was a uniquely even-handed appreciator of poems from all sectors of the poetry world but had a common touch that made her columns profoundly democratic. Her achievement was exceptional and remarkable. She was personally kind to me when a hostile poet upset me at one of my first festival readings, and I’ve never forgotten that humanity in her. Gwyneth Lewis, poet, Wales

‘Enormous generosity’

I was amazed the first time that Carol featured my work in poem of the week. And when she did so a second time, I was beyond astounded. She also included me in the Smart Devices selection, which meant an awful lot to me. But these things are just personal examples of her enormous generosity. She will be missed by poets, publishers and readers of poetry. Billy Mills, Ireland

‘You will always be in my heart’

I feel so sad tonight having just read this article about Carol Rumens’ death. I am sure all of us who followed and commented on her weekly poetry choices are feeling the same. I can’t write you a poem Carol. but you will always be in my heart for your words and wisdom and humour over the years. Thank you Carol. Patricia, England

‘She featured a poet I recommended to her — then dedicated a poem to him after his death’

I never met Carol Rumens in person but, from May 2016 when she featured To a Nightingale by the English late-modernist poet RF Langley, I began posting comments below the line of poem of the week, sometimes engaging in discussions with her and others in that space. She became the most influential facilitator of poetic talent in the English-language media through her stewardship of poem of the week.

In between, she wrote often astute critical commentaries introducing work by poets from all over the world. She may have been underrated or undervalued as a contemporary British poet and critic, but she never condescended to the unknown or unsung. She was generous enough to consider recommendations from others, as when, in June 2018, she featured Leaving home at 10, from Nigerian poet and literary scholar Harry Garuba’s final collection Animist Chants and Memorials (2017), a copy of which I had sent her. Garuba died of leukaemia, aged 61, in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2020, and Carol wrote the poem A Bed of Wild Strawberries, dedicated to him, and published in Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love: A Gedenkschrift for Harry Garuba (2022). Idowu Omoyele, Kent

‘Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste but that didn’t matter’

I’ve always liked poetry but it hovered in the background playing second fiddle to novels and films. When I discovered the Guardian online 20 years ago, I noticed the PotW column and decided to join in to bring poetry in from the cold. Carol’s choices were eclectic, not always to my taste, but that often didn’t matter as it was a great insight into how work was created. She joined in too, so wasn’t aloof. Edward Taylor, Lancashire

‘I lacked confidence, then Carol chose one of my poems for her column’

Carol chose one of my poems early on for her poem of the week: it was ahead of my first book publication and I was still a little confused about “how to poet” and “whether to poet”: I lacked confidence and couldn’t feel my voice as actually mine. Every poem I wrote seemed to me a mishmash of other, older, better poems. It’s impossible to overstate how much the mere fact of being taken seriously, of having my poem delicately and seriously taken apart, each piece held up to the light, made me certain that I wasn’t going wrong or presuming too much. I have been grateful for more than 20 years for that sensitivity and insight. Anonymous

‘Many of her selections have become my favourite poems’

I looked forward to Mondays with Carol’s choice of poem. So many of her selections have become favourite poems and she introduced me to many new poets. Douglas Kemp

British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.

Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Rumens’ poems, often profoundly political, were published across more than a dozen collections, including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She also wrote plays, fiction, criticism and published poetry in translation.

She began writing the Guardian poem of the week column in October 2007. Over two decades, she developed an engaged readership, responding to each column in the comments section.

Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, south London. She began a philosophy degree, but left before finishing it and later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.

Her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. In the mid-70s, she worked as an editor on Croydon-based magazine Pick, before becoming poetry editor at Quarto and Literary Review in the early 80s.

Through the 80s, she published several collections, including Star Whisper, The Greening of the Snow Beach and her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on the first of several translated volumes of poetry from Russian, by poets including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry in translation “revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary”, Rumens wrote in 2007. “It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells.”

Rumens taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor, where she was a longtime visiting professor.

The poet was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize for best single poem twice, and the same year, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley award.

Her first Guardian poem of the week choice in was Far Rockaway by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. Over the following two decades, she would write nearly 1,000 columns, featuring poems by household names in between those of lesser-known writers.

For her final column, published in February, she chose two poems by Matthew Rice. In the comments section, one reader thanked her for her “usual great choice of poems and erudite introduction”.

In 2019, a collection of 52 poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices.

“I’m still surprised to find myself writing a weekly blog at all,” Rumens wrote in 2019. She described feeling “electrified” by the research process behind the columns. “To lift off from the launching pad of a poem, and bounce and float through the galaxies of Search, learning bits and pieces which ought to be unrelated but which mesh because I am their narrator, is as exciting as the process of writing a poem – and, in fact, remarkably similar to it.”

Taking on the column, “I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them,” she continued. “That’s the selfish, self-loving bit. The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems.

“I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, any way, as best I can.”

Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)
Given the relish with which Nagra pushes and pulls at English, it’s worth noting that Yiewsley is a real west London suburb. This location allows him to continue his career-long exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience and, through it, wider questions of identity. But as Nagra turns 60, location is becoming increasingly a matter of time as well as space. The classic struggle of each first generation to arrive in Britain, and the pressure on its kids to make good, now sits within a 1960s and 70s time capsule. Enoch Powell and the National Front cast violent shadows, but parkas, school blancmange and cricket strike a sweeter, almost elegiac note.

Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Much as they have in prose, Fitzcarraldo are awakening British poetry publishing to the glamour of braininess. Mer de Glace is named for a dying French glacier, but the sequence is set on the 1,047km-long Polish river Vistula, along which Lebda ran in 2021. Images of fires and firesides recur: we are all of us out in a wild, vulnerable world. This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable. Rosenthal’s quietly fluent translations give us “books that help us close the mouth of night”, light as “Baltic mercury” and, as the runner nears the end of her journey, a “pelvis tilting / towards the open sea”.

The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
It’s not surprising this has won an American National Book award. Smith’s passionate voice is incandescent with all that’s grotesque and cruel in American Black experience, but also with a deeply sexy lyricism: in Your Man, “I wait for his mouth, the mercy circle”. This New and Selected Poems embraces contemporary urban life, from addicts’ needles to church deacons. But elsewhere the infamous photo of Emmett Till in his casket is evoked alongside actual photos of enslaved women, which frame a sequence giving them voice. And female experience is everywhere, right from the famous opener, What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).

Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches, £11.99)
Dastidar is a poet of energy and presence. This fourth collection is thematically eclectic; anything can be the occasion for poetry, from “bullshit jobs” to Tory nationalism, jukeboxes to “funk dancing”. As Dastidar spins us from topic to topic, we find ourselves believing, with he, that this proves the vitality of the genre. Besides, his writing itself – which includes sonnets, ghazals, even an alphabet poem – often glitters. It does so especially in the title poem, a sonnet celebrating all that’s accelerated: city life, dating, “being kissed brimful … under the cherry blossom every Saturday night”.

Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose by St John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland (Penguin Classics, £12.99)
Every generation makes key texts its own. Sprackland’s new translation of the poetry and meditative prose of the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross is both provocative and timely. A contextualising introduction by Colin Thompson, himself an earlier translator, is followed by Sprackland’s own crunchy Translator’s Note a brilliant taster of the challenges she and predecessors rise to. In her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions, the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II. “Falcon love” and a “wounded hart” brave the “wild wood” or “shepherding night”: imagery both hieratic and human.

A lost copy of a poem composed in the seventh century by a Northumbrian cattle herder – the earliest surviving poem in the English language – has been discovered in Rome.

Scholars from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome.

Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century. The Old English version discovered in Rome is believed to have been transcribed by a monk in northern Italy between AD800 and AD830.

“When we saw it we looked at each other and I said, ‘No one knows about this’,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, who discovered the manuscript with Mark Faulkner, from Trinity’s school of English. “To make sure I wasn’t dreaming I double-checked the catalogues and there was no mention of it. It was a huge surprise, a very good one.”

It is the third oldest surviving text of the poem, after older copies held at Cambridge and St Petersburg. Those other versions have the poem in Latin, with the Old English text added in the margin or at the end.

The Rome copy is significant because it contains the Old English version in the main body of the text, reflecting the language’s growing status in the ninth century, said Faulkner. “The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in.”

The poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, which shows that word spacing was a relatively new invention, said Faulkner. “It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”

The researchers have detailed their findings in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, an open-access journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Caedmon is said to have been an illiterate cattle herder who worked at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. According to Bede, he had a divine visitation that inspired him to compose and sing Hymn, which lauds God for creating the world.

Bede included a Latin translation in his landmark work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but omitted the original Old English version. However, within a century a monk at the abbey of Nonantola, in northern Italy, included the Old English version, said Faulkner. “It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.”

There are at least 160 surviving copies of Bede’s history. Conflicting evidence about a copy in Rome prompted Magnanti, an expert in medieval manuscripts, to ask the National Central Library in Rome to check its archives. The institution located, digitised and emailed pages that included the poem. “This discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by digitising their collections and making them freely available online,” she said.

Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and rare books at the Rome library, said the institution was digitising holdings from Italy’s National Centre for the Study of the Manuscript, which will give researchers access to more than 40m images.

Riccardo Fangarezzi, head of archives at the abbey in Nonantola, said he looked forward to further discoveries. “The present times may be rather dark, yet such intellectual contributions are genuine rays of sunlight: the continent is less isolated,” he said.

The poet Paul Muldoon translated Caedmon’s Hymn into contemporary English in a 2016 anthology of British poetry. The opening lines read:

“Now we must praise to the skies, the Keeper of the heavenly kingdom,
The might of the Measurer, all he has in mind,
The work of the Father of Glory, of all manner of marvel.”

Evelyn Araluen has been shortlisted for the Stella prize for her second poetry collection The Rot, four years after she became the first ever poet to win the prize for Australian women and non-binary writers.

Announced on Wednesday, the other five books up for the $60,000 prize are Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days, Miranda Darling’s novel Fireweather, Lee Lai’s graphic novel Cannon, Marika Sosnowski’s nonfiction 58 Facets: On Violence and the Law, and Tasma Walton’s novel I Am Nannertgarrook.

In February Araluen won $125,000 and the top prize at the Victorian premier’s literary awards for The Rot, a collection that explores grief and solidarity in the age of doomscrolling, particularly the horror felt by many as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was beamed to phones around the world.

The Rot was inspired by an experience Araluen had while reading two poems at Adelaide writers’ week in 2024, where she was heckled for referring to Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide on stage.

Araluen told Guardian Australia last month that The Rot reflected “a really panicked, distressed window of a time, that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret.”

“I tried to make sure that the book very clearly documented that we knew what was happening in our names and we did not stop it,” she said. “I hope that this book dates. I hope it reads as incredibly naive and doesn’t catch a glimpse of the political ambitions that are going to be realised in the future. But if it doesn’t, I want it to be a record of a very, very uncomfortable truth that we’re all going to have to live with.”

The Goorie and Koori poet won the Stella prize in 2022 for her debut collection, Dropbear.

The six shortlisted books were chosen from the 212 books entered this year. Each of the shortlisted authors receives $5,000 in prize money.

Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days explores her grief after the sudden death of her partner of 35 years, the journalist Tony Horwitz. The award-winning Australian-American author left her home in Martha’s Vineyard to travel to Flinders Island, off Tasmania’s northeast tip, in order to reflect on their life together.

Darling’s novel Fireweather is a follow-up to her 2024 novel Thunderhead, and follows a woman who must prove she is sane while dealing with the collapse of her marriage, domestic life and the climate.

Non-binary graphic novelist Lai is nominated a second time for the Stella with Cannon, about a queer Chinese woman who suppresses her emotions until they erupt out of her.

Sosnowski, a legal anthropologist, is nominated for 58 Facets, a hybrid of memoir and investigative nonfiction that examines how individuals can be both beneficiaries and victims of history, through her work in Syria and the story of her own family. These include her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Australia, and her great-uncle Chaim Gaon, who played a role in the formation of the Israeli military.

And Walton is nominated for I am Nannertgarrook, a fictionalised retelling of the life of her titular ancestor, who was abducted from Boonwurrung Country and sold into slave labour in Tasmania.

Chair of judges, Sophie Gee, said the six shortlisted books “reflect the creative vitality, literary rigor, and expressive richness of Australian women’s and non-binary writing”.

“None of these books was as we expected, going in. Each of them moved us to the core through language, the truth of their emotion, and the honesty of what it means to be human, across time and space,” Gee said.

The 2026 Stella prize winner will be announced on 13 May. Last year the prize was won by Michelle de Kretser for her novel Theory and Practice.

Goyle, Chert, Mire by Jean Sprackland (Jonathan Cape, £13)
The 45 unrhymed sonnets in Sprackland’s sixth collection coalesce into three spellbinding interwoven sequences. Set in the Blackdown Hills, a remote stretch between Somerset and Devon, the poems explore the friction between art and articulation, habitat and inhabitation. Here, the landscape is not a backdrop but a linguistic event: “a drop swells on the lip of a leaf and falls / like a word being said”. By removing the first person throughout, Sprackland makes us encounter the landscape intimately: it’s not mediated through a speaker’s interiority but in “mossy silence”, “the rumble of the combine harvester”, “the noise / of meltwater hurtling over stones”, or “the shattered pieces of yourself”. Overshadowed by an unnamed illness, the poems bear wounds but don’t broadcast suffering; this restraint fosters minute attention to “pilgrim gnats attending the water” and the mire’s “long translation from gley to peat”. Sprackland’s ability alternately to narrow and widen our focus – from a closeup on insect life to geological time – reveals how consciousness itself moves between scales. Unlike many nature poems that overanimate or sentimentalise, the book is alive to the limits of human agency: it knows “language itself is prone to collapse”. Yet in that collapse, we can find meaning; recognise the “spiky logic” of natural process, following it as “the sparrow enters / and follows” the “sprawling holly”. The unwavering sonnet form represents an act of courage, a disciplined response to illness and dissolution, creating order where language threatens to collapse. This is a profound, enduring collection.

The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore (Corsair, £14.99)
Moore’s new collection constructs an ambitious architecture for exploring intergenerational trauma and motherhood. At its best, we find her confessional signature, as in The Black Notices, cataloguing unidentified murdered women, or Giving Birth With Anne Sexton, where literary inheritance meets bodily terror. Sometimes, however, this commitment to sincerity and transparency results in poems that feel like pedagogic exercises: Damaged Cento catalogues the “eight stages” of domestic homicide, while The Trimesters documents pregnancy’s upheavals. The motherhood poems, though deeply felt, risk predictability in their exploration of well-trodden territory – breastfeeding, bedtime routines, and the spectre of parental loss (“I imagine someone taking her away, / or a car ploughing into the pram”). It’s technically hard to make this new. Moore clearly presents the “I” as a site of shared, unpolished vulnerability, prioritising emotional legibility over lyric innovation.

The Tree Is Missing by Shannon Kuta Kelly (Faber, £12.99)
“I’m not sure yet what the threshold is”: uncertainty about geography and intimacy looms large in this elusive debut. Drifting between Polish border towns and the changing seasons, Kelly’s poems are invested in disconnection or dissociation, lingering around “the place that is nowhere” (train stations, mirrors, missing trees) to create a mood-board expressing displacement and memory loss. Kelly’s minimalist style, marked by end-stopped lines and unrhymed couplets, enforces a sense of stasis: “Time always goes and everyone is waiting.” While the restraint can feel prose-like, it’s punctuated by tactile details such as “a mummified frog” or “the smell of frying lardons”. These atmospheric sketches keep the reader behind glass, rather than inhabiting the haunted materials.

Dog Star by Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape, £13)
An existential wrestle between body and soul remains one of Symmons Roberts’s defining poetic drives, and in his ninth collection that tension finds urgent new energy in grief and species loss: “But these words contain their negation. / For every goldfinch put into a poem, / one will vanish from the world outside.” Attentive to humans’ destructive impact, the collection carries a “wild voltage” as it shows natural and urban worlds colliding into “a brief coalescence of matter”. A keen observer of flora and fauna with a Midas-like gift for metamorphosis, Symmons Roberts discovers kinship between unlikely phenomena: “Only the mountain hare has guile and sorcery / to stand tall like a heron in a river.” Although some poems would benefit from tighter distillation, Dog Star showcases the poet’s “ungovernable electricity”, the force of “a primeval singer with a modern / repertoire” extending his range with sure-footed confidence.

Horses by Jake Skeets (Akoya, £14.99)
“Horses buried / thigh-deep in mud / clawing for the first world”: documenting the 191 wild horses that died in 2018 in the Navajo Nation during extreme drought, Skeets channels haunted animal voices into fast-changing “mineral strata”, where a river makes the sound of “grocery store carts / a freeway a few yards east of us”. Recalling Eliot’s The Waste Land, he recreates a desert landscape visited by ghostly thunder, yet his lines breathe distinctively, pressing indigenous cosmology and consumer modernity into violent contact. “We become lightning sometimes and there/ only then become song, carry our ache, its kick pull haul hull”: each syllable marking a separate exhalation, a separate loss. The collection’s sharpest grief is found in these discomforting lines: “there is microplastic in my name / there is a drought in his”, before opening into wonder: “there is a meteorite in my hand / a sparrow in yours”.

A poem about language, love, and processing distressing world events has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The Gathering by Partridge Boswell was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries.

The poem came from Boswell’s attempt to make sense of global suffering, state violence and war. He describes how he “followed the media for a long while, writing elegies, parodies and rants” to make sense of his “discomfort and disbelief”, and the emotional burden this entails.

“We were blown away by this poem, and we couldn’t resist returning to it again and again, each reading yielding more insights into its ambition, the emotional stakes and philosophical perspicacity of its ideas,” the judges said of The Gathering.

“The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” they added. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”

Boswell is the author of the Fool for Poetry prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and the Grolier prize-winning collection Some Far Country. He is also the co-founder of the Bookstock literary festival in Vermont.

“For this poem to receive such recognition is a humbling and massively ‘affirming flame’ in a dark winter,” Boswell said. He wins £5,000 for his first prize poem. Nine other winners were also named, including runner-up Damen O’Brien for his poem Axe (winning £3,000) and third prize winner Zoe Dorado for Badminton (winning £2,000). The top three poems will be published in the spring 2026 issue of the Poetry Society’s journal, The Poetry Review.

Seven commended poets, each winning £500, were Jim McElroy, Kate Wakeling, Alex Mankowitz, Mark Fiddes, Jane Ord, Jade Angeles Fitton and Lindsey Forster-Holland. All the poems were read anonymously by a judging panel comprising Susannah Dickey, Ian Duhig and Denise Saul.

The competition was founded in 1978, and past winners include Carol Ann Duffy, Sinéad Morrissey, James Berry and Tony Harrison. Last year, Fiona Larkin won the award for Absence Has a Grammar, inspired by her experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia.

The next competition will open in June.

---

The Gathering

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

Evelyn Araluen has won both the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 Indigenous writing category at this year’s Victorian premier’s literary awards, for her second poetry collection The Rot.

Selected from almost 700 books entered for the prize, The Rot won the two awards on Thursday night, having also been shortlisted in the poetry category. The Goorie and Koori poet won the 2022 Stella prize, and was shortlisted for three premier’s literary prizes, for her debut collection Dropbear.

Speaking before she was aware she had also won the overall prize, Araluen told Guardian Australia she was “excited” to have won the $25,000 Indigenous writing category. Asked if she felt she might have a chance at the top prize, she replied: “Oh God no, I’m not getting a look in at that. I’ll be quite comfortable with my prize, thank you.”

The judges called The Rot “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising” and “a vital intervention in this country’s cultural conversation.” It was written in the span of a few months last year, and was inspired by her experience reading two poems at Adelaide writers’ week in 2024, where she was heckled for referring to Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide on stage.

“These poems were about witnessing a genocide and the feeling of inertia and grief and rage and passivity that sits in the body when you feel so powerless against our government’s complicity in that genocide,” Araluen said. “I had people get up and leave and shout at me and have a go at me … I shouted back and felt so enraged. But I had incredibly beautiful people coming up to me afterwards, some of them crying, saying the poems had helped them understand how they have been feeling.”

After she won the Stella for Dropbear, Araluen spoke about how she had been “one paycheck away from complete poverty”, juggling multiple temporary jobs in the arts while working on her debut. She has since taken a full-time job as an academic, which she said initially “felt like a compromise” but had “allowed me the safety to be able to write more.”

She worked on The Rot “after work, after dinner, in the bath” for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was “irresponsible of me.”

“I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,” she added.

The Rot reflects “a really panicked, distressed window of a time, that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,” Araluen said.

“I tried to make sure that the book very clearly documented that we knew what was happening in our names and we did not stop it,” she added. “I hope that this book dates. I hope it reads as incredibly naive and doesn’t catch a glimpse of the political ambitions that are going to be realised in the future. But if it doesn’t, I want it to be a record of a very, very uncomfortable truth that we’re all going to have to live with.”

Araluen also called on the Australian government to reform the way arts prizes are taxed. Some, like the prime minister’s literary awards, are tax-free, but most, including the Stella and all the state premier literary awards, are taxed as income.

“Winning the Stella prize was really fantastic but it was taxed at nearly 50%,” she said. “When you spend sometimes years of your life working on something, and you have good fortune that you can’t have possibly planned for or anticipated, the impact of a prize can sometimes be quite disruptive financially.”

“Other countries have really intelligent taxation laws that allow artists to continue working in periods of heightened prosperity versus significantly lower incomes. This is not me saying, I don’t believe in tax. Obviously tax is incredibly important. But a lot of people assumed I must suddenly be rich after the Stella, and once you take out tax and Hecs debts and I needed to get my teeth fixed and we had used our superannuation to survive Covid … we don’t really have the advantage of solid, sustainable investment we can rely on.”

In other categories at the Victorian premier’s literary awards, this year’s $2,000 people’s choice award went to Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah, the Australian-Palestinian academic who was controversially dumped from this year’s Adelaide writers’ week, a decision that triggered the collapse of the annual literary event.

Omar Musa won the fiction prize for his novel Fierceland, about two siblings from Malaysian Borneo who must grapple with the legacy of their father, a palm-oil baron, after his death. The judges praised the novel’s “glittering prose and sweeping, ambitious form”.

The nonfiction prize went to Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Australian-Palestinian writer Micaela Sahhar, which the judges described as “a remarkable debut memoir that is simultaneously a work of poetry in its lyricism and feeling.”

The children’s literature category was won by Zeno Sworder for his picture book Once I Was a Giant. The young adult prize was renamed the John Marsden prize this year, in tribute to the famed young adult author who died in December 2024; it was won by Margot McGovern for her horror novel This Stays Between Us.

The poetry prize went to Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada for her collection KONTRA, playwright Emilie Collyer won the drama category for her play Super, and the prize for an unpublished manuscript went to The Kookaburra by Charlotte Guest.

The Victorian premier’s literary awards have been running since 1985.

2026 Victorian premier’s literary awards: winners list

Victorian prize for literature: The Rot by Evelyn Araluen

Fiction: Fierceland by Omar Musa

Non-fiction: Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Micaela Sahhar

Poetry: KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

Drama: Super by Emilie Collyer

Indigenous writing: The Rot by Evelyn Araluen

Children’s literature: Once I Was a Giant by Zeno Sworder

John Marsden prize for writing for young adults: This Stays Between Us by Margot McGovern

Unpublished manuscript: The Kookaburra by Charlotte Guest

People’s choice award: Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah

01.29

When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.

05.29

It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift

and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured

in the same place for so long

and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and

her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.

In plastic, a book-length poem cycle by the Northern Irish poet Matthew Rice, the time-stamp titles ensure that clock-watching is an experience readers share with the narrator and his fellow workers through their 12-hour factory night shift. Whether Rice is observing the enforced machine-order of the production line, evaluating his own thoughts about cinema, music and literature, or empathising with the other workers, each individual short poem is a cherished fragment of perception seeking a moment of freedom from the tyranny of its time-stamp. The two pieces I’ve chosen are exactly four hours and more than 20 poems apart; distinct in tone and structure, each registers awareness that the potential of the individuals concerned, as a collective or singly, is frustrated by their socio-economic position.

The workers in 01.29 are on a break, but their star-gazing is presented from the limited and immediate perspective in which the nearest stars are tobacco-sparks, “the exhaled Milky Way / of Bobby’s Golden Virginia”. The Milky Way leads only to earthbound “ways to navigate shift patterns”. Imaginative or intellectual speculation is forbidden by the laws of factory routine that the workers have had to internalise.

Fully aware of that limitation, the speaker keeps possibility tamped down, while simultaneously acknowledging its power. The phrase “insanity of depth” inscribes the dizziness a free-spirited mental navigation of the cosmos might risk. The speaker and his colleagues are necessary conspirators against visions, star-gazers from the depth of despairing realism. While the poem insists on “nothing seismic or anything approaching / truth”, it acknowledges that the denial falls far short of human “depth”. Stars, increasingly distant, mark time like the numerals on the digital clock but infinitely slower: whereas the sparks released from “Bobby’s Golden Virginia” are all too ephemeral, “the dotted starlight/ doesn’t burn fast enough” for the night-shift workers.

In the second poem, the speaker focuses on a single worker, “wee Gail”, and, by the second line, although her 70th birthday was “last week”, the present-continuous tense is seemingly established: “she has a special / seat to sit on all shift”. Her seat may be connected to the friendly recognition of her birthday, but, more likely, she habitually occupies a particular bench-space for ergonomic reasons, in line with company regulations. The image of the seat is rightly left for the reader to form – and then to transform.

Centrally placed, a single line of monosyllables illustrates the one-dimensionality of Gail’s service “in the same place for so long”, but the resumed triplets have her “making light work” of it all as she skilfully performs her task, “sifting defective ring washers / from those within tolerance”. The poet-speaker, too, makes light work of the romantic, celebratory turn after “and” at the end of the third triplet, when the ensuing pause instigates the vision of deft-fingered Gail as, perhaps, a concert pianist. This wouldn’t be impossible “in another life”. Even here, Rice is almost curbed by realism. Somehow, he succeeds in lifting that heavy shadow cast by “another life”, dissolving it in the glow of what feels like genuine admiration and genuine affirmation.

In an endnote, Rice pays tribute to an 1830 book by the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Worker’s Dream in 19th-Century France. In Rancière’s vision of socialism, labourers desire, and have the potential for, freedom from their work. Rice addresses the mental and physical costs of the labour treadmill, and, as a poet and son of a poet, he is haunted by the concept of repressed creative potential in others. The poem about “wee Gail” is a particularly direct and moving expression of that vision.

The fulfillment of Rancière’s ideal looms close to us in the age of AI, with the decline of human labour at even the white-collar level, and in production lines’ replacement-staffing by robots. Freedom for self-fulfillment will be available, in theory, but how will it be inscribed and allocated by our institutions? The many questions will be tough to solve. In the meantime, the poems in plastic both honour and transcend their traditional factory setting, and remind us of how much there could be to gain in the dawning digital era.

Afterburn by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Best known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that nothing is beneath poetic deliberation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer’s sister. The interwoven specificity and occasional nature of the poems is captivating: one feels their movement, “in the flesh, / in his memory / and in the words”, as they unspool with control and purpose. “I’m still capable of being in love.” This is a poet clearly still in love with life.

Into the Hush by Arthur Sze (Penguin, £12.99)
This first UK publication introduces readers to the current US poet laureate’s bold vision of the world’s fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer, even in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation. While the title suggests a sonic organisation, it may be more apt to understand the poems as painterly brushstrokes. “When you’ve / worked this long your art is no longer art / but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.” Single-line stanzas that decrescendo to em dashes recur, illustrating the silence into which Sze feels both world and body disappearing: “you have loved, hated, imagined, despaired, and the fugitive colours of existence have quickened in your body -”. Even in its continual replenishing beauty, the collection is eerie, as though these poems were a last attempt to bring order to the disorder of living. “What in this dawn is yours?” asks one. Perhaps nothing, because “once lines converge, lines diverge”.

Unsafe by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
“This is how you learn to stay alive – / sunlight streaming / through branches – / all young girls must remain / alert.” McCarthy Woolf’s taut new book reflects both the semblance of wholeness and the opacities of erasure. Alongside the poems, which broadly meditate on the capitalistic impressionability of bodies and landscapes, are photographs of blasted doll heads, metallic and shattered borders, surveillance cameras sutured to palm trees. “How do we claim / the nothing / that is space?” Photography, maybe. Poetry, most definitely – though the collection also contains essayistic explorations of tattoos: “I started to think a tattoo was a way to reclaim agency over the body…” Juliana Spahr encouraged poets to pay attention to the bulldozer as well as the beautiful bird; McCarthy Woolf extends this ecological ethic to the human and the architectural in this playfully sparse and hypnotic collection.

Only Sing by John Berryman, edited by Shane McCrae (Faber, £12.99)
Babe, wake up – 152 new Dream Songs just dropped! Readers meeting Berryman via Only Sing are not encountering the poems that weren’t good enough to make the first cut in his 60s classic; rather, they’ll discover a poetics of fierce vernacular, meticulous sonics, a consciousness unwilling to partition the demotic from the highly conceptual. “Let’s think of his nature as a kind of mist.” The “he” here is Henry, anthero of the Dream Songs, a prejudiced, nervy, white American man who, beyond the idiosyncrasy of situation, wholly resists classification. Berryman is a master of the line and like no other poet produces a page with variable technical tectonics that can stun or quake, often both: “Drink & sing seems all our fate obliges, / sleep feed make love between whiles, till we die, / & what does then our fate oblige?” A treasure trove for Berryman fanatics and new readers alike.

Lamping Wild Rabbits by Simon Maddrell (Out-Spoken, £11.99)
Loss and candour categorise Maddrell’s debut collection. The speakers feverishly recall desires often accompanied by the contrapositive of shame: “how their smooth twigs age and develop warts / there I go again talking about shame”. While the subjects include memory, life with HIV and the transformation of innocence, the language is steeped in a poetics of interpenetration, observed with a rich descriptive eye: “Polaroid of people gone, re-faced for posterity, / white-powdered cheeks, dust marks death on my pants.” The prize of age is wisdom – “the captive live longer than the wild” – and moments here silence the reader to introspection.

Dream Latitudes by Alia Kobuszko (Faber, £12.99)
“Often, I felt I was / on the precipice of some great / feeling,” declares one of 11 poems titled “X”. The letter X? The Roman numeral? Or have the titles been cut away? Approximating a climax that never arrives, Dream Latitudes is a strange debut – strange like waking up in the afternoon’s “armfuls of light”. Kobuszko’s poems are songs littered with accidentals, changing the timbre of their music, sometimes line by line. “There is nothing to do but sleep. There is nothing but sleep. How to exhaust the inexhaustible?” Fields, dreams, songs, birds, green, light, horses, pain – a poet can save these words from cliche if, like Kobuszko, they “unspool” them in a haunting music that neither entices nor repulses. “Tell me you can hear me when I say / in the fields of our dreams I will find you.” This collection breaks many rules, and is all the better for it.