The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize

The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize was established to commemorate the life and work of the late Vincent Buckley; poet, critic and Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. It is a biennial award that is offered alternately to enable an Australian poet to visit Ireland and to facilitate the visit of an Irish poet to Melbourne. The Prize, which has been made available through generous donations from family and friends of Vincent Buckley, provides the recipient with a return airfare, a contribution towards living expenses and an honorary fellowship at the Australian Centre.

2008 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize

2008 recipient: David Wheatley
Highly commended: Catherine MacCarthy
Commended: Nell Regan

Judges' report:

There was an outstanding field for the Vincent Buckley Prize this year. We received twenty-one applications from Irish poets hoping to come here and write in the Centre. The standard was very high indeed, suggesting that Ireland is still a green nest of singing birds.

The judging panel, Bronwyn Lea, John Frow and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, had to read closely and think hard; but in the end we settled clearly on the poet, David Wheatley, author of several books and editor of the international journal, "Metre". His poetry is rich, accomplished and full of readerly pleasures. At the Centre we look forward keenly to his coming over here, in 2008. He writes that his poetry has "in recent years been drawn to themes of movement and migration. He looks forward to the "give and take" of his period here.
We are sure that his visit will enrich the Centre's cultural community, and that he will take back much from his time in Australia.

To be placed on the application mailing list, please email awards-austcentre@unimelb.edu.au

PAST WINNERS

Bronwyn Lea - 2006
The 2006 winner was Bronwyn Lea from Queensland. The accomplishment of her seemingly-relaxed poems was to generate a surprising power, which only increased with re-reading. With highly original points-of-view, there was a voice here moving easily between the private and the public sphere. She has even written a suite about feet.

Mark Granier - 2004
Mark Granier was born in London in 1957 and grew up in Dublin, where he is still living. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. His first collection, Airborne, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2001, and he received an Arts Council Bursary the following year. It was for the MS of his second collection that he was awarded The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. This collection, The Sky Road, is forthcoming from Salmon in 2007.

Cate Kennedy - 2002
Cate Kennedy has won several awards for short fiction and poetry including the Age Short Story Competition in 2000 and 2001, the HQ Short Story Competition in 2001 and the Herald Sun Short Story Prize in 2002. Her first book of poetry, Signs of Other Fires, published by Five Islands Press, won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2002 and was commended in the Victorian Premiers' Literary Awards. In the last 12 months Cate has been the judge of the Glen Eira Short Story Competition, the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize, the C. J. Dennis Poetry Prize and the Victorian Premiers' Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Cate lives in North East Victoria.

John Montague - 2000
John Montague was born in 1929 in New York, and grew up on the family farm in County Tyrone. He was appointed the first Ireland Professor of Poetry in late 1988. It is the first Chair of Poetry in Ireland and the first cross-border academic Chair. Tenable for three years, Montague is attached to each of three universities for twelve months - Trinity College, Dublin, the Queen's University of Belfast and University College, Dublin. The Chair was established to mark the standing of Irish poets on the world stage this century, and to commemorate the achievement of Seamus Heaney in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Professor Montague taught at University College, Cork for 18 years, before resigning in 1988 to become a full-time writer. He has a substantial body of work, primarily poetry, but also a few books of fiction. He serves as distinguished writer-in-residence for the New York State Writers Institute each year.

Aileen Kelly - 1998
Aileen grew up in England, and is a Melbourne poet and educator (MA (Cantab), DipContEd). Her poetry has been widely published in Australian journals, and she is represented in two anthologies from Oxford University Press (NY) and two from Oxford University Press (Melbourne). Her first book, Coming up for Light, won the Mary Gilmore Award and was short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry.

" I can say confidently that while I was [in Ireland] I sorted out some knotty problems of work previously done, wrote three times as much as I would have done at home, gained an appreciation of current Irish poetry..., and have also begun to place a previously puzzling element of myself."

Enda Wyley - 1996
Enda was born in Dublin in 1966. She graduated from Carysfort College, County Dublin with first place in English Literature, and accepted a scholarship from the British Academy to Lancaster University, where she completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

Her first book of poetry, Eating Baby Jesus, was published by the Dedalus Press in 1994. It depicts a brutal, bleak picture of life in Dublin's urban wastelands. The title poem of the collection was a finalist in the British National Poetry Competition, and this was the volume that won her the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Over the past several years, Enda has taught deprived children in a housing project in Dublin, so she has seen at first hand the violence and despair that poverty and deprivation breed.

Her collection, Socrates in the Garden, was launched in May 1998 and was also published by The Dedalus Press.

Lisa Gorton - 1994
Lisa is a BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. After her visit to Ireland as the inaugural winner of The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, she went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to study English Literature. She completed a Masters and then a Doctorate on 'John Donne's Cosmos'. She continued to write poetry, which was published in various journals including Poetry, The American Review of Books and Antipodes.