Welcome to Chook Raffle

An introduction to the Anne Elder Award project

State of National Poetry Prizes

I’ve been thinking a lot about literary prizes lately. It perhaps started in about 2017 when my BookTube subscription feed was filling up with video reviewers reading the entire Man Booker longlist. While this practice of so closely following a prize as to predict the longlist, read the longlist, predict the shortlist, then predict the winner, was not a new practice in 2017, it was new to me. In the intervening years, the longlist reading project and the hype surrounding literary prizes has only seemed to grow in popularity with both niche followings, like the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK, and larger reading pools, like the Goodreads Choice Awards. In 2021, Hunter Mclendon started a newsletter reading the longlist for the National Book Award. Booktuber Kayla from booksandlala has had a repeat series on her channel reading Goodreads Choice Awards longlists since 2018. I even participated in reading the entire Stella Longlist in 2022 on my Twitter account. Coincidentally, 2022 was the first year that poetry was eligible for the Stella Prize and the first year it won with Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen.

In her acceptance speech, Araluen devoted attention to the need for sustained arts funding in Australia, especially after years of challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic and targeted defunding of artistic organisations and grants.

“This is not sustainable, and it never has been. This structure produces mass inequality of representation and will continue to restrict access for creatives from working class and marginalised contexts. We can do better than this: we can build diverse, democratic, and vibrant arts and education cultures with a dignified basic income, with long-term stable funding for community organisations and professional development programs, with bargaining codes and consultations and policies to protect our rights and safety. We can do this collectively. We can mobilise our arts sector and let artists and educators do what they do best: make art that speaks truth to power, that bears witness to suffering, that demands justice.”

Rereading this speech in the wake of a recently announced funding plan for the arts in Australia including the first appointment of a poet laureate since the 19th-century, I can’t help but think about the nitty gritty of money. The often unspoken-of element of the artistic life, the vulgar but necessary backbone of literary awards. In her speech, Araluen participated in a growing trend of detailing how her prize winnings would be spent, on debt and buying breathing space in her schedule. In a 2020 paper, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young investigated the complicated, interwoven world of American poetry prizes in which they made a passing remark that stayed with me.

“Poets pay close attention to prize announcements because such a small number are given out each year and their economic impact is significant. Prizes are often the only way that poets will ever receive any meaningful compensation for their writing.”

Poetry, in particular, is a small artistic field with little to be gained in terms of riches, security, or cultural prestige. This is true in America but even more so in Australia where our population (read: readership) is so much smaller.

If it is the case, then, that poetry prizes are a major component to keeping contemporary poetry alive financially, what else are they doing? The Stella Prize states their purpose as “[to] create a more equitable and vibrant national culture”, while the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise the “valuable contribution Australian literature and history makes to the nation's cultural and intellectual life.” It’s not hard to see how quickly notions of national culture become slippery and exceptional under scrutiny. That’s part of the huge discussion around literary prizes, the gossip about who made the longlist and who didn’t, let alone who took home the prize and whether the judges “got it right”.

And as another round of literary prize longlists approaches, as I line up my own expectations of which books will win recognition this time, the question rattles around in my head, “What do literary prizes award?” Investigating the inner and outer workings of literary prizes would be a mammoth undertaking, something Spahr and Young only scratched the surface of in their own impressive research. But if I’m going to give it a try, the best place to start must be with the poetry itself. So begins Chook Raffle and the Anne Elder Award project.

Chook Raffle and the Anne Elder Award Project

The Anne Elder Award, first awarded in 1977, is one of the longest running prizes in Australia given to a poetry collection, outstripped by the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry which awarded its last prize in 2012 after 65 years. Specifically, the prize is given to the best debut poetry collection published in Australia with a prize of $1000 awarded by the Victorian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

As the 50th year of the Anne Elder Award looms, it seems the perfect candidate for reflective exploration with an eye for what Australian literary culture is, what it awards, and what kind of impact prizes have. But before the big questions, we must look at the poetry.

Chook Raffle is a bimonthly newsletter featuring a review of a past winner of the Anne Elder Award from 1977 to the present day. (There is one exception of Ella Jeffery’s Dead Bolt which I already reviewed in Plumwood Mountain in 2020.) In the vein of John Kinsella’s retrospective reviews in Southerly, Chook Raffle is about reading poetry removed from the hubbub of promotion, hype, and novelty but with the added consideration of award recognition and the contextualising years of the poet’s subsequent career or, in some cases, the muffling effect of shifted literary attention.

With 46 titles and counting to choose from, I hope that revisiting “successful” poetry collections from the past half-century will illuminate something about Australian poetry or its future as a culture and an art form.

[Note: Chook Raffle is in no way affiliated with the Anne Elder Award or the Victorian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.]