newy.com.au – Hunter Writers’ Centre announced the 30-poem shortlist for the 2025 Newcastle Poetry Prize, with the winner to be revealed during the Newcastle Writers Festival in Newcastle on Saturday 28 March.
Now in its fifth decade, the prize offers a $15,000 first prize and has a focus on long-form poems of up to 200 lines, a format designed to reward sustained voice, structure and movement.
The shortlist was selected by judges Eunice Andrada and Jennifer Compton, with the chosen works to be published in the 2025 Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology.
Hunter Writers’ Centre director Katherine McLean said the award had “for more than forty years” supported poets working seriously with the form. “It’s a pleasure to see that level of craft recognised,” she said.
The centre said preorders for the anthology had opened through the Hunter Writers’ Centre bookshop, ahead of the anthology’s launch at the prize announcement event at the festival.
Shortlisted poems include Omar Musa’s There Is No Word For Bipolar, Michael Farrell’s Doppelgangers Are Over, Duc Dau’s Broken Vietnamese: Sonnet Sequence, and two works by Emilie Collyer: my mother walks every day up a hill and I have been running all my life.
Other shortlisted poets include Ann-Marie Blanchard, Owen Bullock, Mitch Cave, Luoyang Chen, Eva Collins, Angela Costi, Bradley Visaka David, Nigel Featherstone, Alan Fyfe, Kailum Graves, Edie Griffin, Jennifer Harrison, Perrie Holden, Dr Gershon Maller, Shey Marque, Greg McLaren, Peter Mitchell, Damen O’Brien, Ann Shenfield, Ed Southorn, Jo Withers, Vaughan Yage and Gavin Yuan Gao.
Hunter Writers’ Centre said the University of Newcastle, as presenting partner, was sponsoring the $15,000 first prize as part of its support for Australian writers and a broader commitment to literature and the arts.
Founded in 1998, the organisation supports writers across the Hunter region and beyond and also runs awards including the Newcastle Short Story Award, as well as Lighthouse Arts at Whibayganba-Nobby Lighthouse, which hosts residencies and exhibitions.
