Phillips wins 2024 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize

The Queensland Writers Centre (QWC) has announced that Eva Phillips has won the 2024 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for the manuscript Borrow-or-rob.

Phillips receives $2250 and a publishing contract with UQP, alongside editorial development with the publisher.

Judges Jarad Bruinstroop and Eileen Chong described Phillips’ collection as ‘an outstanding work that examines themes of place, appropriation, and extraction through cross-disciplinary considerations of Margaret Preston’s printmaking and contemporaneous writing’.

Sean West was announced as runner-up for the award, for the collection Only Guesswork. West receives $500 and chapbook publication.

This award was announced as part of the Queensland Poetry Awards, which were presented on Friday night in Meanjin/Brisbane at the State Library of Queensland, as part of the QWC’s end-of-year celebrations.

Other poetry prize recipients included Damen O’Brien (winner of the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem, for ‘The Dam Dries’), Nathan mudyi Sentance (winner of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry for ‘Country centred metaphors/rockets’), and Vuma Phiri (winner of the Arts Queensland XYZ Prize for Spoken Word for the piece ‘An Apology to Myself’).

Poet and advocate Yvette Holt was also presented with the Queensland Writers Centre’s annual Johnno Award for outstanding services to writers and writing in Queensland. Holt is the chair of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN).

More information about the Queensland Poetry Awards, including runners-up, is available on the QWC website.

Last year’s winner of the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize was Madeleine Dale for her manuscript The Water-Bearers.

Pictured: Eva Phillips. Image credit: Phoenix Senhenn.

Category: Awards Local news