Sarah Day
Sarah Day’s poem ‘The Orphan’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her books have won awards including the Queensland Premier’s and ACT poetry prizes. She has collaborated with musicians in the United Kingdom and Australia, and has judged national poetry, fiction, and nature-writing competitions. Her ninth collection, Slack Tide, (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022), was shortlisted for the Tasmanian Literary Awards.
Photograph credit: Gordon Harrison-Williams
Jakob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his bir ... (read more)
Readers who loved James Rebanks’s autobiographical The Shepherd’s Life: A tale of the Lake District (2015) – a bestseller at home and abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and winner of numerous prizes – will welcome this new work. His first book tells the story of a recalcitrant youth who wants nothing more than to leave school early to work on his parents’ and grandparents’ farm ... (read more)
In times of war
At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant batteringand steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.
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In 1990, composer and artistic director Konstantin Koukias and production director Werner Ihlenfeld founded IHOS Opera in Tasmania. Audiences were excited and astonished by the scale and ambition of the director’s vision when they attended his earlier, spectacular productions such as Days and Nights of Christ, To Traverse Water, and Tesla. IHOS works became associated with huge spaces.
Tesla to ... (read more)
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions … From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.
Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay on modern fiction (1919), might have been describing Claire Potter ... (read more)
Damen O’Brien’s first collection is an exceptional accomplishment. His individual poems have won several competitions (including the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). O’Brien signals the emphases of Animals with Human Voices in his afterword, stating that the world has become a ‘meaner’ place during the ten years of its completion: ‘a place of harsh politics, that values outrage over ki ... (read more)
for Gabriella Smart
There’s no getting away from things.There is driving, then walking milesalong a quiet coast on a rising tide –with the back-of-the-mind consciousnessthat in an hour or so the seawill have reached the cliffs of shalewith their pebble threads to denote other epochsof Earth events and that you will be wading in wateron return. There is walking the distance to seethe Monarch b ... (read more)
And to the other men from Afghanistan,and Iran and Iraq, who prepared a feast for meone midday, years ago on my way to work,laid the clean sheet smoothon the worn carpet of the furnitureless house,placed dishes of spiced rice and chickpeas,and slid a plate towards me –there were not enough platesto go around – and with upturned palmsurged me to eat first,I want to thank you and sayI’ll alway ... (read more)