Australian poets are encouraged to enter this year’s Blake Poetry Prize, which for the first time is being hosted by Liverpool City Library and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre.

Entries close on 2 June for this prestigious biennial event, which has a first prize of $5000.

The Blake Poetry Prize challenges poets to explore themes such as faith, spirituality, religion, hope, humanity, social justice, belief and non-belief.

Liverpool Mayor Wendy Waller said entries must be new works of 100 lines or less.

“The Blake Poetry Prize starts an important conversation about who we are as human beings,” Mayor Waller said.

“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.

“From 2017 Liverpool City Library, in partnership with Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, will deliver The Blake Poetry Prize as a biennial event.

“This year, we have three accomplished judges to oversee the prize Maxine Beneba Clarke, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Mark Tredinnick.”

The Blake Poetry Prize has run six times since its inception in 2009.

For more information and entry forms, visit casulapowerhouse.com/get-involved/prizes.

Background:

·        Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent whose collection Carrying The World won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award prize for poetry.

·        Ali Cobby Eckermann won the Kuril Dhagun Indigenous Writing Fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was awarded the Book of the Year at The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2013.

·        Mark Tredinnick won the inaugural Blake Poetry prize in 2009 and has taken home many prestigious awards since, including the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012).

·        Previous winners include Tredinnick, John Watson, Tasha Sudan, Robert Adamson, Graham Kershaw and Anthony Lawrence.