Best of Australian Poems 2022

Judith Beveridge has published seven volumes of poetry all of which have won or been short-listed for major prizes. Her latest volume, Sun Music: New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2018), won the Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize in 2019. She has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry, (Puncher & Wattmann 2016).  She was poetry editor for the literary magazine Meanjin from 2005-2016. Her work has been studied in schools and universities and translated into many languages. She taught poetry writing at post-graduate level for many years at the University of Sydney and continues to work in the community. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memoria Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for excellence in literature.

Sydney-based poet Peter Boyle is the author of ten books of poetry and eight books as a translator of poetry from Spanish. His most recent collections are Ideas of Travel (Vagabond Press, 2022) and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings (Vagabond Press, 2021). With MTC Cronin he is the author of two collaborative books of poetry: Who Was (Puncher and Wattmann, forthcoming) and How Does a Man Who Is Dead Reinvent His Body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli (Shearsman, 2008). His books have received numerous awards including the Queensland Premier's Award for Apocrypha in 2010 and the New South Wales Premier's Award for Coming Home From the World in 1995, for Ghostspeaking in 2017 and for Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness in 2020. As a translator his books include Anima by Cuban poet José Kozer, and The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo.

Bonny Cassidy is an author of Irish and German descent. She lives on Dja Dja Wurrung land, in a native forest in Central Victoria. Bonny is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Chatelaine (Giramondo Publishing, 2017) which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She also co-edited the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). Bonny’s essays on Australian literature and culture have been widely published, and she is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne. Bonny’s first book of nonfiction, Monument, is forthcoming in 2023. A hybrid of poetry, archival research, travel writing, historical fiction and micro-essays, it explores the material and psychological legacy of her colonial migrant forebears on unceded lands.

Maya Hodge is a Lardil and Yangkaal emerging writer and curator based on the lands of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is dedicated to disrupting colonial narratives and centering First Nations storytelling and autonomy. Maya’s writing and poetry have been published by Australian Poetry, Kill Your Darlings, Craft Victoria, Hardie Grant, Cordite Poetry Review, and Overland. In 2021, she was selected as a runner-up for the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition and this year was shortlisted for the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize.

Jeanine Leane belongs to the Wiradjuri people from the Murrumbidgee River in south west NSW. She is a writer poet and teacher whose prose, essays and poetry have been published widely in Australia and abroad. She is the editor of Guwayu – for all times: A collection of First Nations Poetry and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a queer non-binary poet from WA. Their first collection, Clean, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and Reads Rainbows LGTBIQA+ Best Books of 2022. Mitchell is also a former Red Room Fellowship recipient.

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. They have written two poetry collections: Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which was shortlisted in 2021 for the Queensland Literary Awards and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Ellen also won the Queensland Literary Awards – Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre Literary Awards – Peter Blazey Fellowship in 2019.

Harry Reid is the author of Leave Me Alone (Cordite, 2022), the best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020) and a co-director of Sick Leave.

Sista Zai Zanda (Sista Zai/Achihera) is an Afrofuturistic Storyteller. Sista Zai was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and raised in a large extended family. Achihera is Karanga and now lives as a Black African settler on Kulin Nations. Amongst career highlights, Achihera is a 2019 recipient of the Neilma Sidney Travel Fund and a recipient of a Melbourne Strategic Scholarship to research for a PhD in Afrofuturisms at the University Of Melbourne.