Firstly, thank you to the 141 entrants in the 2017 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize. Each and every poem that was entered was a pleasure to read. A big thank you also goes to Fiona Hile + Ross Gillett for judging the Prize and for coming along to Sunday’s Words in Winter event where the winners + shortlist were announced.
Without further ado, we are thrilled to announce this year’s winning poems:
Co-winners
Michael Farrell, Melbourne, Vic: Hamlet in the Mind of a School Teacher
Mark Miller, Shoalhaven Heads, NSW: Journey, the South Coast
Highly Commended
Brian Purcell, Green Point, NSW: Painting Trees at Valla
Stuart Barnes, The Range, QLD: Black Swan Polyptych
Geraldine Burrowes, Melbourne, Vic: How We Get Through Accidentally
Jeff Guess, Gawler, SA: Transgression of the Trees
Packing Room Prize (as chosen by the Holmgren Design office staff)
Gary Smith, Melbourne: Death of a Gardener
Thank you to Juanita from Broderick Photography for capturing the spirit of Sunday’s event so eloquently:
If you’d like to find out when the 2018 Venie Prize is announced, please subscribe to our very infrequent email newsletter or like us on Facebook.
2026 Venie Prize winner
MegU September 1 2026
Here is what judge Peter O’Mara had to say about all of the poems entered in this year’s Venie Prize: In such a conjectural, estranged times, this year’s entries arrived, not coincidentally, from a multifarious array of the environmental poetry index — the polemical, the elegiac, the embodied, the observed, the incidental, the expansive, the
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