‘So many stories to tell’: First Nations poet wins prestigious literary prize

First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen has won this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize, taking home $100,000 for her poetry collection The Rot.

Australia’s richest state-based literary prize was awarded to Araluen for her second poetry collection, which the award judges described as “vulnerable, taut and uncompromising”.

Araluen’s widely acclaimed debut poetry collection Dropbear, which interrogated Australian colonial myths and literary archetypes, won the Stella Prize in 2022; she was the first poet to win (in a year when poetry was eligible for entry for the first time). The Bundjalung author, editor and researcher, then 29, became the youngest author to win the $60,000 prize.

Co-editor of the Overland literary journal, Araluen also took home the prize for Indigenous Writing at the awards, which were announced in Melbourne on Wednesday evening, for which she was awarded $25,000. The overall winner is drawn from eight category winners. Araluen was also nominated in the poetry category.

In a statement released ahead of the ceremony, Araluen, one of the country’s best known contemporary poets, described her win as “an incredible honour”.

“The shortlist and highly commended books are all brilliant works that give testimony to the breadth and diversity of our storytelling practices and forms,” Araluen said. “Literary prizes are always somewhat unnatural and can be subject to completely arbitrary systems of value.”

While she won the Prize for Indigenous Writing, Araluen said she doesn’t think of The Rot as “an especially ‘Indigenous’ book”.

Billed as “a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world” and “a liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism” The Rot’s collision of poetry and prose was described in this masthead as “a reckoning of global imperial capitalism, weapons manufacturing, Gaza and settler-colonialism, among other things” and “not one of those poetry books you can skip through; it demands concentration, both on a line-by-line basis and on a larger, more conceptual basis”.

“Compared to Dropbear it’s a darker work, more introspective and focused on issues of gender and global imperial capitalism,” Araluen said of The Rot. “At the same time, being awarded this prize reminds me that we have so many stories to tell, and so many forms available to express our voices.”

Other authors recognised at the prestigious awards include Omar Musa for his novel Fierceland, which took out the Fiction category; Micaela Sahhar, whose debut memoir Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family won the Non-Fiction award; and Eunice Andrada, who won the Prize for Poetry for her collection KONTRA.

The Prize for Drama was awarded to Emilie Collyer for Super and Zeno Sworder’s Once I Was A Giant won the Prize for Children’s Literature. The category for Writing for Young Adults was this year renamed the John Marsden Prize, in tribute to the acclaimed author, teacher and mentor who died in late 2024. YA author Margot McGovern won that prize for her horror novel This Stays Between Us.

Palestinian-Australian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was disinvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week last month, prompting a mass author boycott and leading to the cancellation of the event before she was invited by a new board to next year’s event, won the People’s Choice Award. Abdel-Fattah’s novel Discipline was nominated by the voting public and was awarded a prize of $2000, funded by The Wheeler Centre.

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