The 69th Blake Poetry Prize
The Blake Prize is an open poetry prize that challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief.
The Blake Poetry Prize | $5,000 | Non-Acquisitive
The Blake Poetry Prize is presented in partnership with
Announcing the Winner of the 69th Blake Poetry Prize
Click the video below to hear Chen Wang read, The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting.
Chen Wang
The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting
Chen is a Melbourne-based medical student whose writing explores migration, memory and the spiritual dimensions of trauma and healing. He came to Australia from China when he was eleven years old. Drawing on clinical encounters and his own diasporic background, he is keen to explore how language can wound or protect, and how faith endures in environments that attempt to measure everything. This poem continues his interest in how stories survive within systems that struggle to understand them. Chen was the winner of the 2025 BalintANZ Medical Student Reflective Essay Competition.
Judges’ Comments
“This is a narrative poem in ten short sections. The language is simple, straightforward, and restrained in its expression of emotion. It is almost at times like a brief report. The free verse lines mostly present as the sentences and phrases delivering each element of the narrative. The narration imagines most vividly the inner life of a woman visiting a hospital for a consultation about treatment of her pain.”
“The artistry of the poem emerges from the clash of a medical world with the woman’s grief over the killing of her son in the Middle East, of a science-based hospital-world with her deeply held religious beliefs, of her powerfully expressed spiritual longing with an interpreter who must make nurses understand what she is saying. When she is asked where it hurts, and she points to her heart, “They mark it as localised pain.”
“The clash is not simple, and the poem acknowledges this while remaining focused upon its own empathy for a woman who, above all, needs understanding. The gift of this poem is its belief that we can all, beyond cultural and religious differences, share the yearning and the beauty of an inner spiritual life.”
The Highly Commended Poets of the 69th Blake Poetry Prize
Click the video below to hear Adrienne Eberhard read, Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington.
Adrienne Eberhard
Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington
Adrienne Eberhard’s most recent collection, a bilingual edition, Marie & Marie, was published in Paris in April 2025 by Editions tituli. It was translated into French by Catherine de Saint Phalle, novelist and translator. Adrienne has published five previous collections, including an artist’s book, The Voice of Water, with painter, Sue Lovegrove. Her poems have been widely anthologised, and published in the UK, the US and France. Previous collections have been longlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize, the Tasmanian Literary Awards, and shortlisted for the Tasmania Book Prize.
Judges’ Comments
“This poem in ten parts is a free verse lyric of intense engagement with nature, and with the ways words might entangle us with the details of our natural world. The poet has a sure touch with snatches of verbal music, alliteration, and the drama of line endings as the poem steps through its ten sections. Each seven-line stanza begins by picking up and transforming a word from the stanza before it, offering over and over again this strong sense of a world stitched together by an immanent ‘blessing’ —for want of a better word.”
“Each element of this landscape is enlivened by actions. Grasses ‘wrap the earth’, trees ‘snare boulders’, ponds ‘reflect cathedrals of sky’ until the poem becomes a prayer of thanks and a luminous reminder that we do, and we can, sense a blessedness all around us. The poem doesn’t merely make a case or state a belief, it enacts an immersion that is itself an act of wonder few readers could resist.”
Click the video below to hear Vuong Pham read, Father.
Vuong Pham
Father
Vuong Pham’s poetry explores themes of displacement and cultural identity. One of his poems, ‘Mother’ is studied as a prescribed text in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate English syllabus (2019—2025). His honours include the Woorilla Poetry Prize (2025); Frontier Poetry Prize (2025); Bridport Poetry Prize (2025); South Coast Writer’s Centre Poetry Prize (2025); Local Word Poetry Prize (2025); Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize (2024); Shinhaiku Contest (2024); Newcastle Poetry Prize (2023); Free Expression Haiku Competition (2013); and the Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize (2013). He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poetry. Read more on his website at: https://vuongphampoetry.
Judges’ Comments
“This piece moves through changes in perspectives, time and intentionality, that all simultaneously feel engaging and driving, particularly with its intense use of chiaroscuro. Motifs of heat and fire are transformed mesmerisingly to bring the complexities of parental reverence to light. ‘Ancient fire, as if the garage / was a dragon’s den. He welds hour after hour / in the oppressive heat. Night arrives. He pauses.'”
“The poet offers a finely poised, elegant, and richly textured portrayal that flows with an undercurrent of depth.“
The 69th Blake Poetry Shortlist
There were almost 700 poems submitted for the 69th Blake Poetry Prize, and each judge read every poem. This was its own privilege, for it was a window to what poets are doing, thinking, trying out, and practising in the wide, complex and uncertainly mapped regions of spirituality and belief. Though most of the strictly religious poetry was Christian, there was a strong presence of other equally powerful and venerable traditions, from Islam to Buddhism and beyond, into the beliefs and practices of Aboriginal ancient ties to country. There were, of course, many very good and highly original poems that did not make the final shortlist, and we want to say to those poets that we are sorry we could not—in the spirit of the competition—give prizes to all those who deserve one. Near-misses were many.
There was a gratifying scatter of irreverent, comedic, and satirical poems too, and none of these were bypassed simply on the grounds of being less reverent than other poems. We searched for poems that in the end had something worth saying, had some originality of approach, and fizzed with freshness, regardless of whether they were irreverent, Christian, pantheitic or otherwise.
Our thanks go to all the poets who submitted, for without those many voices the competition would fall silent. With them, it becomes a choir we have been lucky to listen to for the past three months.
~ Kevin Brophy AM, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Coco X. Huang
All shortlisted poems will be displayed at the Liverpool Powerhouse as part of the Blake Prize Exhibition, May-June, 2026.
Allison Browning
There’s No Such Thing as Astrology* (Or: The last Trump / Odious Joy)
Allison Browning (she/her) is a writer and psychotherapist, living in Naarm, Melbourne. Her work has appeared in publications including Best Australian Poems, Australian Love Stories, Overland, Island Magazine, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Kill Your Darlings and Going Down Swinging. Her writing has been recognised in awards including the Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, the NSW Poetry Prize, and the Dorothy Porter Award for Poetry. Her novel in progress has received support from a Varuna Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship and a Glenfern Fellowship.
Judges’ Comments
“Pockmarked with corrections and redactions, ‘There’s No Such Thing as Astrology’ wrestles with narrative and narration in an experimental, multiplicitous style evocative of the contemporary public discourse surrounding queerness. The incorporation of endnotes enhances deconstructive readings, which firmly situate this timely assemblage and provide an abundance of linguistic contortions for readers to unpick.”
Freshta Nawabi
Jigar in a Jar
Freshta Nawabi (she/her) is an Afghan-Australian poet and lawyer living on the Darug lands of the NSW Cumberland plains. Her poems have been published in The Quarry Journal and as part of Silence Transformed, the second anthology of short writings from WestWords’ LGBTQIA+ Writer’s Group. She is currently working on her first collection of poems, which she hopes to release into the world sooner rather than later.
Judges’ Comments
“Slinking across the page with youthful irreverence, ‘Jigar in a Jar’ gleefully puts the devil in the details that spring forth with each re-reading. With touches of melodrama, sans the harshness of satire, the poet’s approach to spirituality is uniquely textured and suffusive. The integration of culturally specific language adds semantic complexity while serving as an invitation into a space that may quickly feel familiar in its pointedness.“
Kathryn Reese
Post Vespers
Kathryn Reese writes poetry & flash. She lives on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical microbiology and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in The Engine Idling, Epistemic Literary, Crowstep and Red Room Poetry. Her flash are in Glassworks and 2025 Flash Flood. She was a winner of the Red Room Poetry’s #30in30 competition & the Heroines Women’s Writing Prize 2024.
Judges’ Comments
“Many poems attempted to re-write prayers or create new prayers this year, yet few succeeded as ‘Post Vespers’ did to grip the reader’s attention and say something new. The specificity of the poet’s language made this poem stand out. To this poet prayer is paradoxical, invoking the contradictions of faith, “If prayer persists it means you aspirated during baptism, and all the red wine spilt on your white shirt since cannot wash it down.” Yet, like many who accept the challenges of faith by returning to prayer they do so with transformed belief.”
Omar Sakr
Ode to Prednisone
Omar Sakr is the son of Arab and Turkish Muslim migrants. The author of four poetry collections and a novel, he won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2020, the Bess Hokin Prize for Poetry in 2023, and the 2024 Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship. His latest book is The Nightmare Sequence (2025).
Judges’ Comments
“So many poems this year explored faith that is tested through illness and tragedy, and ‘Ode to Prednisone’ was among the most inflicting of this cohort. A son presents with a mystery illness and no desire to eat: “we prayed, we bribed, we screamed / for him to eat an animal or a vegetable…to finally rid ourselves / of this endless hunger.” What “eats” at us is the metaphor at the core of this poem that rails against a child being diagnosed with cancer in the same way they rail against colonialism, the cost of living and the brutal parenting of the past. This is a poet who understands the vocal quality of poetry in their use of repetition and alliteration to full effect.
A stream of consciousness poem driven by love as much by anger, ‘Ode to Prednisone’ asks us to appreciate the fragility and precarity of life, and the faith we must conjure to give a little more when we have nothing left to give: “the barest brush of fingers as we take and take / what each of us has to give.”
Terri Slanovits
Aftermath
Terri is a 66-year-old single grandmother who has lived in the same Moorebank home for forty years, a short distance from the Liverpool Powerhouse—once the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and still a place of creative pulse. She visits often, sometimes for lunch, sometimes to lose herself in a show or exhibition. It was here that she first discovered the Blake Art & Poetry Prizes. She does not call myself a poet—far from it. In truth, she feels almost audacious submitting an entry to such an esteemed competition. And yet, something inside her insists. She believes deeply in the poetry of life itself, and in the quiet alchemy that occurs when lived experience is shaped into words or art.
Judges’ Comments
“From the outset ‘Aftermath’ sets out to be a poem that draws the reader in with its brutal honesty. This free verse lyric poem, while not technically perfect, keeps the reader gripped with the urgency of its affecting emotions, of cancer treatment, loss through suicide and raising their grandchildren. In “Aftermath”, the serpent’s “shedding can mean renewal” and “darkness can be a cocoon” to find the respite to carry on. By its conclusion the poem becomes a life-affirming paean for the poet, her grandchildren and readers to find the faith to press forward, to discover “something sacred waits” even in the face of life’s darkest devastations.“
Special mention poets of the 69th Blake Poetry Prize
Click the video below to hear Phillippa Cordwell read, Father.
Phillippa Cordwell
Father
Phillippa grew up on a wool farm on Ngarrindjeri country in South Australia. She raised a family, and researched a PhD entitled ‘The Spirit in the Land’, which explored her developing consciousness of living with the land and its people. All the while, Phillippa has written poetry and short stories that have been part of her developing spiritual consciousness.
Judges’ Comments
“‘Father’ is a well-balanced, nuanced portrait that unfolds with heft while retaining its grace. Shifts in time and sentiment are compelling and propulsive, especially across the intensity of the middle stanzas.”
Celebrating the Longlist for the 69th Blake Poetry Prize
Liverpool Powerhouse, in collaboration with WestWords, are honoured to present the longlisted poets of the 69th Blake Poetry Prize.
This year’s judges recognise the below poems, for their breadth and depth in exploring spirituality in a contemporary context.
The Judges
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon
Photo accreditation: Logan Griffiths
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is from Walyalup/Fremantle and spent over a decade living and working in the US, inspiring her recent collection on motherhood in the wake of the first Trump presidency, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears (Life Before Man/Gazebo Books). Her writing has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Australian Book Review and alongside the US poet laureate Ada Limon in the anthology, Dear Human. She has won the Bruce Dawe and KSP Poetry Prizes; and has been shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. In 2024 she completed a PhD in Creative Writing on erasure poetry and forgotten histories. Currently, she teaches creative writing and ESL in university, college and private settings.
Kevin Brophy
Photo accreditation: Nicholas Walton-Healey
Kevin Brophy is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. He is a past winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay, and the Michel Wright Prize for poetry. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Vogel Prize and the FAW Christina Stead award. He has been patron of the Melbourne Poets Union since 2004, managing publisher for Five Islands Press (2008-2020), and Director of the Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry (2022-ongoing). He is an Emeritus Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. In 2021 he was awarded an Order of Australia (AM) for services to creative writing and education. His latest book is the poetry collection, An Inventory of Longing (Whitmore Press, 2025). Martin Duwell, in Australian Poetry Review, has written of this book that, ‘There is a good case for seeing Kevin Brophy as one of Australia’s most humane poets.’
Coco X. Huang
Coco X. Huang is a Chinese-Australian writer, musician and scientist. She primarily writes fiction and poetry and enjoys creating intermedia: interdisciplinary hybrid works that challenge and extend conventional forms.
Her cross-disciplinary works recently won the 68th Blake Poetry Prize and the Youth Award of the Remagine Art Prize. She has also received a Faber Writing Academy Scholarship and Caruso Writing Residency at the KSP Writers’ Centre and was shortlisted for the Booranga Prize for Prose and the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize for Poetry.
She is a Toolkits: Digital Storytelling and Citizen Writes alumna and has performed at the National Young Writers’ Festival, Boundless Festival, Sydney Festival and QPoetry! 2024. Her works have appeared in Meanjin, Voiceworks, the Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Meniscus, fourW and elsewhere.
Key Dates
Entries Open: 10am, Friday 18 September, 2025.
Entries Close: 9am, Monday 15 December, 2025.
Shortlist announcement: 2 April, 2026 via WestWords newsletter, socials and online.
Exhibition Launch and Winners announcement: Friday 1 May, 5pm, at Liverpool Powerhouse, 1 Casula Powerhouse, Liverpool, NSW.
Exhibition Dates for Shortlisted Poems: 2 May – 14 June 2026.
About the Blake Poetry Prize
The Blake Poetry Prize is an aesthetic means of exploring the wider experience of spirituality with the visionary imagining of contemporary poets. The Blake Prize takes its name from William Blake, a poet and artist of undoubted genius, who integrated religious and artistic content in his work. The Blake Poetry Prize challenges contemporary poets of disparate styles to explore the spiritual and religious in a new work of 100 lines or less.
The Blake Poetry Prize is strictly non-sectarian. The entries are not restricted to works related to any faith or any artistic style, but all poems entered must have a recognisable religious or spiritual integrity and demonstrate high degrees of artistic and conceptual proficiency.
To listen to the full shortlisted poems from the 2024 competition, read by the poets, click here
To listen to the full shortlisted poems from the 2022 competition, read by the poets, click here
To listen to the full shortlisted poems from the 2020 competition, read by the poets, click here
Entries have now closed.
Entry Fee: $30
To see the prize’s terms and conditions, or scroll to the bottom of the page.
If you have any questions, please email: admin@westwords.com.au
Conditions of Entry
To read the full Terms and Conditions, click here
- The following persons, and their immediate family members, are ineligible to enter the Blake Poetry Prize 2025 (the Prize):
- Competition judges;
- Current Liverpool City Councillors and current Liverpool City Council employees (including casuals); and
- Directors, staff and Board Members of sponsor organisations.
- All entries must demonstrate recognisable engagement with the themes of:
- Spirituality;
- Religion; and/or
- Belief.
- All entries must have been created no earlier than two years before 18th September 2025.
- Entry Forms must be completed and submitted by 9:00am, Monday 15th December, 2025.
- Late or incomplete entry forms will not be accepted.
- An entry is deemed to be incomplete and ineligible if the entry fee has not been paid.
- Eligible entries must:
- have only one author;
- not be longlisted for any other literary prize;
- be between one and a hundred lines in length (not including the title but including footnotes and subheadings);
- be in either PDF or Word format; and
- not include any identifying information (including the name, pseudonym, nor contact details of the author).
- Entrants may enter a maximum of five poems.
- The author warrants that the submitted poem is original and does not infringe on the copyright, moral rights, or other rights of any other person.
- Work must be original and solely authored by the applicant. By entering a submission, the entrant hereby declares that no Generative AI tools (large language models) were used in the creation or editing of their submission.
- Liverpool Powerhouse and WestWords reserve the right to request a Statutory Declaration from any author regarding the works originality, its production within the specified timeframe and/or that it does not in any way infringe upon the rights of any other person as detailed above.
- Entries may have been published elsewhere, including in a literary journal, online, or in a self-published book or collection.
- If an entry to the Prize becomes longlisted for a prize elsewhere, the entrant must notify WestWords in writing (admin@westwords.com.au) that entry has been longlisted for another prize. Following, the entrant will have twenty-four (24) hours to decide whether they will:
- Withdraw their entry from the Prize by notifying WestWords in writing; or
- Withdraw their entry from the other prize.
- In the event that the entrant fails to notify WestWords, or that the entry is longlisted in another prize and is not withdrawn within 24 hours, the entry will be disqualified for consideration for the Prize.
- Eligible entries using or referring to Aboriginal content and/or entries from writers of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent or who identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander must be in accordance with the Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their heritage (ICIPR) guidelines and to the Aboriginal protocols of the region where they have been produced (https://www.artslaw.com.au/informationsheet/indigenous-cultural-and-intellectual-property-icip-aitb/ ).
- By submitting an entry into the Prize, the entrant grants permission for WestWords and/or Liverpool Powerhouse and/or Liverpool City Council to print and display the entries all shortlisted entries, in full or in part, online or as part of the Blake Prize Exhibition, April-June, 2026.
Corrections* Between April 2nd and April 28th, Vuong Pham’s poem ‘Father’ was incorrectly hyperlinked and attributed to Phillippa Cordwell. This has since been amended.
The Blake Poetry Prize is presented in partnership with
