June 9th, 2024Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize open
Entries for the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize are now open until Sunday, August 4.
The winner will be announced at the Words in Winter festival in Daylesford on Sunday, August 25.
In her late 50’s Venie Holmgren began to write poetry and her first published anthology, The Sun Collection for the Planet in 1989, became a poetry ‘best seller’.
At the same time, she applied her environmental activist skills and commitment to the campaign to save native forests near her home on the far south coast of NSW, where she was arrested twice for obstructing log trucks.
After 16 years of solo self-reliant living she moved to the local town of Pambula where she penned her travel memoir, several more books of poetry and travelled widely as a performance poet.
In 2010 Venie moved to Hepburn where she wrote her last poetry collection, The Tea House Poems. In January 2016, Venie ‘caught the bus’ at the age of 93.
Judges for the prize are Tim Loveday and Jodi Vial. Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, educator and clown-lark and in 2023 was the winner of the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize.
As the recipient of a 2021 Next Chapter Fellowship and 2022 Writers’ Space Fellowship, Tim’s work explores class, masculinity, rurality and climate collapse.
In 2022 he won the Dorothy Porter Poetry Award, in 2023 he was shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, long-listed for the Wyndham Flash Fiction award, and came runner-up in The Kyogle Poetry Prize.
Jodi Vial writes across the forms of poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, with a focus on the intersection of literature, landscape and history.
She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, working on a hybrid memoir that centres women’s archival voices.
In a previous life, she was a newspaper journalist. Her microfiction has been shortlisted and longlisted in the Joanne Burns Microfiction Prize, and her writing has been published by Spineless Wonders, Recent Work Press and Papatuanuku Press.
Link: www.holmgren.com.au
