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, and a contribution towards living expenses.
In 2012, the Prize will support an Irish poet to visit Australia.
2010 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize
Winner: Elizabeth Campbell
Highly Commended: Sarah Holland-Batt
Highly Commended: John Jenkins
Download the Judges Report (PDF 260KB)
To be placed on the application mailing list, please email awards-austcentre@unimelb.edu.au
Past winners
David Wheatley - 2008
David Wheatley is the 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.
Also in 2008, Catherine MacCarthy was Highly Commended, and Nell Regan was Commended.
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.