In partnership with Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, we are thrilled to announce the launch of the 2021 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize. 
Major prize: AUD$1000
All entries must be received by 11.59 pm EST, Monday July 26 2021. The winner will be announced at the Words in Winter festival in Daylesford on Sunday August 22 2021. The judges for the 2021 competition are Carissa Lee and John Charles Ryan.
Entry terms and conditions
- 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- Poems must be unpublished (including online) and not under consideration by other publishers.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 poems will be published on www.holmgren.com.au and in Rabbit.
- An entry fee of $10 will be charged and is payable via bank transfer, credit card, cash or cheque. 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, Monday July 26, 2021.
- Selection will be made by the judges. The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.
About the judges
Carissa Lee is a Noongar woman born on Wemba-Wemba country. She works as an actor and writer based in Melbourne.
Carissa is currently undertaking her PhD in Indigenous theatre through the University of Melbourne. She has just begun her new role as Indigenous and Public Policy Commissioning Editor for The Conversation.
Carissa’s writing has featured in The Guardian, IndigenousX, Book Riot, Melbourne Writers Festival, Witness Performance, Junkee, and Red Room Poetry.
John Charles Ryan is an environmental writer and plant enthusiast. His interests include poetry, conservation and the environmental humanities.
John recently edited an issue of the online journal Plumwood Mountain on plant poetics, co-authored the book Introduction to the Environmental Humanities with Routledge, and co-edited the anthology The Mind of Plants with Synergetic Press. His collaborative botanical poetry collection Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum was released in 2020. He is affiliated with Southern Cross University as Adjunct Associate Professor and Nulungu Research Institute, Notre Dame University, Australia as Adjunct Senior Research Fellow.
2021 submissions now closed
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.
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