Christchurch author wins Mary Gilmore Award

Christchurch author Joanna Preston has won the prestigious Mary Gilmore Award

The Summer King by Joanna Preston, the inaugural winner of The Kathleen Grattan Award, New Zealand’s richest poetry prize, has now added another notch to its belt by winning the prestigious Australian Mary Gilmore Award 2010 for best first book of poetry.

The Mary Gilmore Award, conducted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and named after the writer and socialist Dame Mary Gilmore, is presented every second year to a fi rst book of poetry by an Australian writer. On deciding upon the 2010, winner the judges had to choose from 39 entries. According to the judges, given the variety of the work, they were surprised that they agreed so readily, but their shortlists were remarkably consistent.

From the judge’s report: ‘Joanna Preston’s title poem, the first in the book, jolts the reader with its imaginativeness and dramatic power, and these qualities are apparent in all the poems that follow. A strong grasp of the actual underlies imaginative representations of both the natural world and the humanly made, generating a dramatic intensity, even in the quieter poems. This is a book of succinct, taut writing that displays a depth of imaginative thought.’

Preston is an Australian who settled in Christchurch in late 1993 and has since contributed greatly to New Zealand poetry. Her book roams the world. Two sequences act as the heart and spine of the collection. The ‘Cowarral’ poems are centred on the author’s ancestral farm in mid northern New South Wales. And triggered by the collective nouns that fi rst appeared in The Book of St Albans, which the poet hunted out when she moved to the United Kingdom, the ‘Venery’ sequence is an exploration of two aspects of the hunt: the pursuit of prey and the pursuit of sensual pleasure. According to the judge of The Kathleen Grattan Award, Fleur Adcock, these warm, accessible poems show ‘technical skill, originality, verve, wit and humanity’. This is narrative poetry that will appeal to everyone who has fallen in love, lost someone, been shocked by violence, and who wants to see the magical in the everyday. To add to the pleasure of reading and owning this book, cover and internal design is the work of Wellington book designer Sarah Maxey.

ENDS

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