The 2017 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize will be open for entries from 2 December 2016 to 30 June 2017. Final Judge: Billy Collins

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About the Prize

The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize has been offered annually since 2014. On behalf of the University, this is administered by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), part of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research in the Faculty of Arts and Design.

The prize celebrates the enduring significance of poetry to cultures everywhere in the world, and its ongoing and often seminal importance to world literatures. It marks the University of Canberra’s commitment to creativity and imagination in all that it does, and builds on the work of the International Poetry Studies Institute in identifying poetry as a highly resilient and sophisticated human activity. It also builds on the activities of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, which conducts wide-ranging research into human creativity and culture.

The 2017 prize will be announced in September 2017 and prize winners and short-list will be notified prior to that.

Important details are:

• The winner will receive AUD$15,000
• The runner-up (second-placed poem) will receive AUD$5,000
• Four additional poems will be short-listed
• All poems entered for the prize will be single poems that have a maximum length of 50 lines (see the Conditions of Entry for further details)
• Each entry of a poem will cost AUD$15 if submitted by 11:59pm GMT, 28 February 2017 and AUD$20 if submitted between 1 March and 30 June 2017. There are discounts for students.
• Judges
• Full Conditions of Entry
• How to Enter page

2017 Judges

Head judge:

Billy Collins is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Longlist judges:

Elizabeth Campbell was born in Melbourne in 1980. She has been the recipient of many prizes including the Vincent Buckley Prize, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and an Australia Council residency in Rome. Her books, Letters To The Tremulous Hand and Error are published by John Leonard Press.

Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian poet and writer. Her publications include No Traveller Returns (Salt 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill Press 2005), Undraining Sea (Egg Box Publishing 2009), Dark and Unaccustomed Words (Egg Box Publishing 2012), Utter (Peepal Tree Press 2013), and Simple Complex Shapes (Shearsman 2015). Her latest collection, Measures of Expatriation, was published by Carcanet and won the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Sudesh Mishra’s fifth volume of poetry, The Lives of Coat Hangers, came out with Otago UP in 2016. He is Professor of English at University of the South Pacific.