Meet the 2025 Poem Forest Judges

We're thrilled to introduce you to this year's outstanding judges, who will be selecting the winning entries for each of the eight prize categories after the prize closes on Friday, 26 September 2025.

Every year, we invite a line-up of brilliant individuals as our judges for the Poem Forest Prize. For the first time, our 2025 judging panel will also be out commissioned poets.

This year's judges are Aboriginal scholar and Author Tyson Yunkaporta, Arrente, Jamaican, Irish and Scottish songstress, poet and producer Aurora Liddle-Christie AKA SOLCHLD, and children’s author and 2024 Poem Forest Accredited Teacher Prize Winner Blake Nuto.

Aurora Liddle-Christie

Aurora Liddle-Christie aka SOLCHLD is a dynamic creative professional of Arrernte, Jamaican, Irish, and Scottish settler background. She has extensive experience in the performing arts as a spoken word poet, performer, singer/ songwriter and facilitator, having worked on numerous projects that centre First Nations storytelling.

Aurora's commissioned poem 'With Change' was composed during a trip made to visit her sister in the mountains, "There, the air is crisp, and our kids play in the mud, climb logs, and follow the geese around the ponds. The cell phone reception is poor out there, so most of the time I'm offline—leaving space for other senses to come online."

Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and author of Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises.

For Tyson, “Poetry, done right, is not about naming ‘the thing’ but about pointing to the thing without naming it. This is where Indigenous Worldview lives, in not naming or studying the thing, but the relationships and connections between the things.”

Blake Nuto

Blake Nuto is an internationally published author living in lutruwita (Tasmania). He is the author of ‘Child of Galaxies’ (2020), ‘A Day That’s Ours’ (2022) and ‘When You’re A Boy’ (2023).

Reflecting on his Poem Forest poem 'Am I Rebellion?' Blake said,

"My first draft had a different ending. Fire can be regenerative. The earth is regenerative. Months later, native grasses flourished. Years later, the animals returned. Instead we go further into the human/nature relationship. We see the fire in ourselves. ‘Is that bad? Do I need to tame it?’ A second voice responds. You aren’t separate from the natural world. There’s space to make your own conclusions."