Brown wins 2019 ALS Gold Medal

Pam Brown has won the 2019 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal for her poetry collection click here for what we do (Vagabond).

Brown’s collection was chosen from a shortlist of six that included works by Luke Beesley, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella, Jamie Marina Lau and Gail Jones.

In their citation, the judges said ‘click here for what we do stands out for its extension of the possibilities of poetic form’.

‘It is a book made of four long poems with a range of perspective and tone that might be read as 3D—or cubist ecological,’ the judges said. ‘In no Australian writer today is the practice of commentary, or meta-narrative, so thoroughly textualised into the work itself … On each reading the poems seem to recycle themselves into new, critical, correspondences: with the talk of the world—its smartness, viciousness, conformity and vapidity—and within and across the poems themselves.’

The ALS Gold Medal is awarded annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) for a ‘work of outstanding literary merit’ published in the previous calendar year. Last year’s winner was Shastra Deo for her debut poetry collection The Agonist (UQP).

More information about the ALS Gold Medal can be found on the ASAL website here.

Category: Awards Local news