Holmgren Design is thrilled to announce the launch of
The 2024 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize
Major Prize: AUD$1000
Submissions close August 4, 2024
About the judges
Tim Loveday
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, educator and clown-lark. In 2023 he was the winner of the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize. As the recipient of a 2021 Next Chapter Fellowship and 2022 Writing 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. His work has been widely published. Tim is the verse editor for XR’s Creative Hub and the director of Curate||Poetry. He teaches Poetry and Performance at RMIT.
Jodi Vial
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. Her framed microfiction cycle, Lives of Girls and Women, won the Penny Finnegan Art Prize and resides in the University of Newcastle permanent art collection. She was a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of NSW in 2023. Jodi lives and writes on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi people.
About Venie
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 .
You can read more of Venie’s life here.
Entry terms and conditions
Major prize: AUD$1000
All entries must be received by 11.59 pm EST, Sunday August 4, 2024. The winner will be announced at the Words in Winter festival in Daylesford on Sunday August 25 2024. The judges for the 20234 competition are Tim Loveday and Jodi Vial.
- Entrants must be citizens of Australia or have permanent resident status in Australia.
- Poems must be unpublished (including online) and not under consideration by other publishers.
- Poems that have won or are under consideration in other competitions are not eligible.
- Poems must have an environmental theme.
- All poems must be written in English. No images, videos or audio files.
- The winning poem will be published on www.holmgren.com.au
- An entry fee of $10 will be charged and is payable via credit card. An email will be sent as confirmation once the money has been received.
- The name of the poet must not appear on the manuscript (including the header, footer or file name) since all poems will be considered anonymously.
- Poems must be no more than 80 lines of text.
- Multiple entries are permitted, though a $10 fee applies to each poem.
- Please ensure you are satisfied with your poem before submitting. Poems that are resubmitted will incur a second fee.
- The competition closes 11.59 pm EST, Sunday August 4, 2024.
- Selection will be made by the judges. The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.
Submissions closed
The 2024 Venie Prize has now closed.
The winner will be announced at the Daylesford Words in Winter festival on Sunday August 25 at 5pm, and on holmgren.com.au on Tuesday August 27.
Submissions
Please complete a separate form for each submission.
Just a reminder that your name MUST NOT appear on the document (including the header or footer) since all poems will be considered anonymously. Many thanks.
Max. file size 5MB. Accepted file formats: pdf, doc or docx
Submission Fee: $10:00
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