Smith wins 2024 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize

Yasmin Smith has won Island magazine’s 2024 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for the poem ‘The Burial Feathers’.

Smith’s poem was chosen from about 500 entries. The two runners-up were Emilie Collyer for ‘Lateral ambling gait’ and Helen Jarvis for ‘and’.

Island poetry editor Kate Middleton judged the 2024 contest alongside Esther Ottaway and Eileen Chong. Middleton said that the winning poem ‘addresses loss, ritual and belonging as it situates itself in the memory of landscape left behind and the reality of a new landscape’. ‘The poem unfolds a narrative amid “the swell of the funeral parlour” that is always clear and yet the language gathers richness and density in its culmination,’ said Middleton.

The winner, runners-up and shortlisted poems will be published in Island 170, to be released on 21 March.

Category: Awards Local news