Judges Fellowship Statement 2024

The Red Room Poetry Fellowship Judges acknowledges the Elders and Traditional Custodians of the lands of all cultural groups across Australia.

We have been furnished with a dazzling range of poetic voices and forms. Successful submissions have enlightened us with poetry as memoir of immigrant dislocation and unknown stories of Croatian settler women in WA; complete cycles of poems challenging transphobic parental views and misplaced protection; lyric and prose poetry exploring overconsumption, environmental degradation, examining Australia’s present rental crisis and housing insecurity; to collaborative poetics interrelationships between arts, language, landscape and revival of endangered languages such as Tasmanian Palawi Kani.

The Red Room Poetry Fellowship 2024 judges would like to congratulate Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (WA), Aloma Davis (Vic), Ella Jeffrey (Qld), Phoebe Grainer (NSW) and Theresa Violet Sainty (TAS) on being the recipients of the Red Room Poetry Fellowships at Varuna for 2024.

We also congratulate Aunty Kerry Bulloojeeno Archibald Moran (NSW) on being the recipient of the inaugural Anywhere Remote Residency.

The judges note submissions to the Red Room Residency roam far and wide. We were deeply impressed and moved by the volume of submissions received speaking to the personal narratives from developing, emerging and established poets submitted to the Red Room Poetry Fellowship. We’d like to thank Red Room Poetry again for this wonderful opportunity and we wish the six recipient’s all the very best with the Fellowship.

Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Thuy On - 2024 Fellowship Judges