Awards

WINNER – Dorothy Hewett Award for the unpublished manuscript Past & Parallel Lives

Judges’ comments: Past & Parallel Lives is a poetic offering that thrums in liminal spaces. It’s about the migratory experience, the queer body, the unfixed, confused identity carving a space in the world. It’s about borrowed languages, (un)belonging, and attempts of navigating treacherous cultural and racial expectations with courage and grace.

Longlisted – Liquid Amber Press 2024 Poetry Prize for the poem ‘Planetarium sestina’

Shortlisted – 68th Blake Poetry Prize for the poem ‘Etymology of paalam’

Judges’ comments:Each line of the poem creates a glimpse into new understanding, its images challenge absolutes and reward the careful attention to its vivid imagery. Through its stanzas the poem wrestles with the semiotics of identity, of words that define being, layered with surprising metaphors and imagery that depict the shaping of a life. Lines like, ‘my body is a loaf made of stone,’ and ‘I know nothing of myself I, a stained-glass façade the queerness I buried is a seed’ question and subvert the religious allusions of the poem, asking more of language, as the subject seeks a deeper understanding of the self.