Hogan wins Mary Gilmore Award, Priest wins Magarey Medal
The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) has announced that Dan Hogan is the winner of the 2024 Mary Gilmore Award and Ann-Marie Priest is the winner of the 2024 Magarey Medal.
The Mary Gilmore Award for the best first book of poetry was awarded to Dan Hogan for the book Secret Third Thing (Cordite Books).
Secret Third Thing, ‘written from corners about corners’, is ‘an argot against the radiation of immobility emitted by capital, against the ways in which capitalist configurations elicit submission without an act of submission’, according to the poet. Judges Lachlan Brown, David Gilbey and Melinda Smith said of the winning book: ‘This is a poetry that pushes grammatical and existential boundaries, dunking on the reader with imperatives, or subtly reflecting and refracting incessant managerial nominalisations.’
Presented annually, the Mary Gilmore Award has been running for almost 60 years. Last year’s winner was Harry Reid for Leave Me Alone (Cordite Books).
The biennial Magarey Medal for biography, awarded to the female author who has published the work judged to be the best biographical writing on an Australian subject in the preceding two years, was presented to Ann-Marie Priest for the 2022 title My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood (La Trobe University Press), the first biography of the poet, which also won the 2023 National Biography Award.
Judges Airlie Lawson, Melanie Nolan and Leigh Straw described My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood as ‘a consummate biography’, which demanded ‘all of Priest’s craft … to make sense of Harwood’, despite over 420 sources being available, as the poet ‘enjoyed reeling in biographical interest but sought to remain elusive’. ‘A self-described Tasmanian housewife and mother, with a marriage accompanied by love affairs with men and women, Harwood battled male cultural gatekeeping in postwar Australia by playfully adopting male nom de plumes and gaming editors. Written with skill and flair like Harwood’s own life, this is a definitive biography that truly gives voice to a woman whose tongue really was her own.’
Magarey Medal judges also commended Jillian Graham for Inner Song: A biography of Margaret Sutherland (Miegunyah), a biography of the Australian composer.
The previous Magarey Medal, presented in 2022, was awarded to Bernadette Brennan for Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears (A&U).
Category: Awards Local news
