The three judges for the 2015 competition – Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Overland’s Toby Fitch and Trinity College’s Katherine Firth – have now decided on a shortlist of six outstanding poems from up-and-coming Indigenous writers.
But really, isn’t nurturing the penniless avant-garde something we should all embrace? If we sincerely believe in the great life of the imagination, the radiant promise of its daily emergence in literature, music, art, and film, and in deep reflection and complex thought – all those inalienable horizons to being truly human – then we should also step-up and protect the imagination from the many equally great forces that humanity casts against it daily.