Awards

2025

Commended – Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry

Judges comments: Past and Parallel Lives articulates a new dimension of Australian poetry. Clear-eyed and prescient, it maps nascent horizons for queer becoming and for anyone intent on excavating their truth. Ortiz is determined to coax the marrow from language, naming and renaming the nameless, never satisfied with a false singularity. The poems are formally dextrous — deft manifestations of their own internal impulses. They impress as technically robust inventions that wholeheartedly claim the page, holographic diagrams that demonstrate how to plot an honest course through the cosmos. They birth a mythology out of loss and hunger, sensitive to tradition but always questioning the given. Ortiz approaches revelation through the kaleidoscopic mundane — grounded in natural longing while turning to meet grace where it lives. A travelogue rich with multidimensional knowing, this collection provides a guide for self-fashioning which, while always attentive to the trauma of birth, celebrates above all else the impulse to live. Past and Parallel Lives returns from the future and from the past with a message of joyous resilience and queer homecoming. We can’t wait to read more.

2024

WINNER – Dorothy Hewett Award for the unpublished manuscript Past & Parallel Lives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