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Winners of 2018 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award announced

12 December 2018
Grace Heyer and Ella O’Keefe named 2018 award winners
New South Wales writer and poet Grace Heyer and Victorian poet and researcher Ella O'Keefe have been announced as joint winners of the 2018 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award.

“We received more than 300 submissions to the David Harold Tribe Poetry Bequest Award, and from a strong and varied field we decided to pick two poems we loved,” said the 2018 judges, eminent poets Associate Professor Kate Lilley (Director of Creative Writing, University of Sydney), Pam Brown and Keri Glastonbury. 

Grace Heyer won the award for her poem ‘The Other Kingdom is Like This’. She shares the award with Ella O’Keefe, for ‘warped up lamplight’.

Ella O’Keefe said finding out she had won the award was “a surprise of the best kind”, while Grace Heyer added that winning the award was “profoundly encouraging”.

The other shortlisted submissions were (in alphabetical order):

  • Geraldine Burrowes, ‘how to deflect’
  • Pascalle Burton, ‘The evolution of her pictorial’
  • Michael Farrell, ‘Sock Puppet Ascendancy’
  • Ali Jane Smith, ‘Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?’

Presented by the Department of English at the University of Sydney, this $12,000 prize has been made possible by a generous gift to the university by David Harold Tribe, author and humanist, to promote the writing of poetry in Australia. 

The winning and shortlisted poems will be published in Southerly in 2019.

About the 2018 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award winners

Ella O’Keefe

Ella O’Keefe is a poet and researcher who lives in Melbourne. Her chapbook Rhinestone was published in 2015 SOd press. Her most recent publication is It’s What We’re Already Doing (Shower Books) a collaborative poem and book made with Elena Gomez, Leah Muddle, Melody Paloma, Emily Stewart and Sian Vate. Her poems have been published in Overland JournalCordite Poetry Review, the Hunter Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry Anthology, the Black Inc. Best Australian Poems series, Text JournalYellow Field and the Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry Anthology.

Grace Heyer

Grace Heyer is an emerging writer and poet from rural New South Wales. Her work has appeared in several Australian journals.

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