Wins 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

- Awarded a highly significant internationally prestigious poetry prize for his poem 'periferal, fantasmal' -

Professor Dan Disney of the Department of English Literature & Linguistics was named the winner of the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize at an online ceremony on January 19 for his poem 'periferal, fantasmal.' The Porter Prize, which is Australia’s most prestigious short poetry competition, was named after Peter Porter, an Australian poet, by the Australian Book Review (ABR).

Five poems were shortlisted among 1,132 entries sent in from 34 countries for this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and Professor Disney’s poem was chosen as the final winner. The poems were appraised strictly by themselves, with the screening conducted anonymously – without revealing the writers’ names – in the form of blind peer evaluation. The judges highly appreciated the poem 'periferal, fantasmal' for its excavation of colonial history sedimented in the names that litter the landscapes of the Gippsland region in Victoria.

Since winning the award, Professor Dan Disney has received great attention from Australian media outlets across TV and radio. In particular, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) Australia interviewed Professor Disney and highlighted his winning of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. (Go to the ABC news interview video)

▲ 'periferal, fantasmal,' 2023 Porter Prize-winning poem by Professor Dan Disney

“Peter Porter opens his poem ‘Landscape with Orpheus’ with an epigraph from ‘The Magic Flute’ – ‘You only live once, let that be enough for you!’ Poems like Porter’s generate not only wonder but also awed awareness. I am dazzled to be in the bright reality of a moment like this, and it is an incredible honor to receive a prize bearing the name of such a great poet,“ said Professor Dan Disney.

Professor Disney’s works have been shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize on three occasions, and he previously won the N.S.W. Premier’s Literary Awards – Australia’s most prestigious prize in terms of collections of poems – for his collection of poems 'Accelerations & Inertias' (Vagabond Press 2021). Moreover, he published his critical research in the form of an edited collection of literary works with the title 'New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry' in 2021, from which one of the poems won the 'Australasian and Pacific Writers & Translators’ Poetry Prize.'

▶ Go to the announcement of the award-winning poem for the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize