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Announcing the winner of the inaugural Southerly Poetry Prize
Congratulations to the winner of the inaugural Southerly Poetry Prize: “Now ● Here ● This” by Christopher “Kit” Kelen Kit will receive a cash prize of $2000 AUD, with his winning poem published in Southerly 81.1 in October 2026. Along with all shortlisted entries, “Now ● Here ● This” will also be published in Southerly online. The judges, Paul Dawson, Bronwyn Lea, and Kate Fagan read 661 anonymised entries before selecting a shortlist and winner. Here is what they said: “Now ● Here ● This” stands out for its linguistic verve, its lyric expression of a soul on the cusp of,…
By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 2: The Ephemeral Things That Save Us
Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. One of the most fascinating things about zines and open mics is how temporary they are compared to the endurance of their emotional impact. A zine fair might last six hours at a local hall. An open mic might run for an evening before everyone disperses into the night carrying notebooks full of half-finished poems. But these fleeting gatherings can completely alter the trajectory of a person’s…
By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 1: ‘Jagged Edges and Rough Words’
Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I’m at one of my fave poetry open mics, Echoes from the Cave Inn, waiting for my name to be called. The crowded room is full of fellow queer, trans, and gender diverse people eating freshly made pizza, sipping beers, and hugging mates they haven’t seen since last month’s open mic. I get up on stage wearing my jorts, and bright pink and orange tie-dye shirt that…
Protected: Long Paddock for Southerly 81.1: Ireland and Other Islands
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Long Paddock for Southerly 81.1: Ireland and Other Islands
This issue is a Festschrift for Professor Elizabeth McMahon, to honour her service to Southerly as its editor from 2008 to 2022. Alongside her dedication to Southerly, Professor McMahon has also long served the Irish community in Australia in myriad ways. It is fitting then that this issue also focusses on Ireland, engaging with our contemporary understandings of Ireland and Irishness and their entanglements with Australian life. This issue asks, what does it mean to be Irish, or of Irish heritage, or to be interested in Irishness, while living and working in Australia on unceded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander…
The Southerly Poetry Prize Shortlist
We are delighted to share the shortlist of the inaugural Southerly Poetry Prize: Our immense congratulations to all, and our immense thanks to all the poets who shared their work with us. We look forward to announcing the winner on the 10th of August. The judges for this year’s inaugural prize are Paul Dawson (Southerly‘s poetry editor), along with esteemed poets Kate Fagan and Bronwyn Lea. Paul Dawson’s latest collection of poetry is Lines of Desire (Puncher & Watmann, 2025). His first book, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry Award. Paul has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian…
Binary Opposition
Rashida Murphy Some years ago, a writer told me she didn’t believe in binary oppositions. This wealthy, white, well-connected woman, a theorist whose intense dislike of de Saussure was reflected in her work, argued that she did not have a structural advantage over an immigrant brown woman in publishing. Race and resources were not a factor in literary success and the real issue, she insisted, was talent. Then came the clincher—stories like yours are the flavour of the month, she said. For several years, I tried to believe the lofty ideal she had proposed. I focused on the real issue…
Announcing the Grace Southerly Emerging Writers Fellowship
Southerly, in partnership with Varuna, is delighted to announce the inaugural Grace Southerly Emerging Writers Fellowship. Three two-week fellowships were awarded to emerging writers of fiction or poetry who demonstrate a fresh voice, a control over form, and a willingness to experiment. We congratulate Brendon McLeod, Eric Jiang, and Greg Foster. Read more on Varuna’s website. The inaugural Grace Southerly Emerging Writers Fellowship is offered to three emerging writers as part of the Varuna Residential Fellowships program. Recipients have no full-length work published. The three fellowship recipients receive: A two-week residency at Varuna, uninterrupted time to write in a private…
Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet
Georgia Rose Phillips “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28. The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”. As…
Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers
Georgia Rose Phillips For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language. When I first learnt how to create…
K.A Ren Wyld Serve the tea Blak
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