Many congrats to Jill Jones for making the shortlist for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, part of the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for Breaking the Days (Whitmore Press).

Jill’s 2015 collection sits alongside those by other distinguished poets whose works have also been shortlisted: Peter Boyle, Paul Hetherington, Antigone Kefala, John Kinsella and Ellen van Neerven. More details at the State Library of New South Wales website.

The winner of the $30,000 prize will be announced at the State Library on
22 May.

Meanwhile you can order a copy of Jill’s book here.

Following the hugely successful launch of Eddie Paterson’s new collection at Melbourne’s Bella Union Bar on 1 February – thanks to Amy Brown for a brilliant launch – copies of redactor are now available for ordering online. Click on the icon below, or go to the titles page and fill the trolley with Eddie’s and other poetry treasures.

redactor uses found texts from the everyday – emails, memos, notes, lyrics, text messages, tweets, webfeeds – as poetic material. Drawing on techniques from the visual arts and radical writing such as the ready-made, the cut-up and the concrete poem, Eddie Paterson reflects upon the ways in which the historical legacy of censorship intersects with contemporary surveillance technologies.

Recent Whitmore titles are also available at selected bookshops, including Collected Works, Melbourne; Paton Books, Geelong; Gleebooks, Sydney; and Avid Reader, Brisbane.

Happy reading!

Whitmore Press is thrilled to announce the launch of redactor by Melbourne poet Eddie Paterson. The details:

Bella Union Bar
Level 1, Trades Hall
54 Victoria Street (cnr Victoria and Lygon Streets; enter via Lygon)
Carlton South
Victoria
Wednesday 1 February
6pm for 6.30 start

Launch by poet and novelist Amy Brown.

All welcome!

redactor uses found texts from the everyday – emails, memos, notes, lyrics, text messages, tweets, webfeeds – as poetic material. Drawing on techniques from the visual arts and radical writing such as the ready-made, the cut-up and the concrete poem, Eddie Paterson reflects upon the ways in which the historical legacy of censorship intersects with contemporary surveillance technologies.

If you’re in or near Melbourne, we hope you can come along and help celebrate Eddie’s book – a timely one following the inauguration of a Twitter-obsessed US president.

Following a very successful launch in Melbourne in November, Meteorites by Carmen Leigh Keates is getting a home-town Brisbane launch. The when and where:

Avid Reader bookshop
193 Boundary Street
West End, Qld
Friday 20 January, 6pm

Come along and hear Carmen in a relaxed Q&A session with Melissa Ashley, author of the recently released fictional biography The Birdman’s Wife.

It’s a free event (wine included!), but so that Avid can keep track of numbers, please register your attendance at http://avidreader.com.au/events/carmen-leigh-keates-meteorites

The Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize has, for the present, been put on hold. We would have loved to continue with the prize for the seventh year straight, but other work commitments have left us little choice but to put the prize in abeyance. We hope to reignite it within a year or two. Thank you to all those who made enquiries regarding the prize for 2016.

Previous winners of the manuscript prize are Jamie King-Holden (2010), B.R. Dionysius and Jo Langdon (2011), Lucy Todd (2012), Andy Jackson (2013), Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones (2014), and Carmen Leigh Keates (2015).

The good news is that the press will continue to publish poetry, with the next scheduled publication being a collection based on Carmen’s winning 2015 entry, due to appear in November 2016.

We’ve been remiss in not getting word of this out earlier, but following the original 200 copies of Andy Jackson’s the thin bridge selling out in just over 12 months, we’ve made a special reprint of 50 copies.

The idea with limited editions is that they do, of course, sell out. But with demand still strong for Andy’s book, for the first time ever we’ve had a small reprint (50 copies). Given these aren’t part of the original limited edition, the reprint copies are unnumbered, but they are all signed by Andy, and are all printed on the same beautiful laid cream, watermarked stock with endpapers.

You can order the thin bridge online from our titles page, or buy directly from Andy if you can make it to one of his readings – which we highly recommend attending.

Two takes on Jill Jones’s Breaking the Days: Robert Adamson’s longer, more exploratory version of the blurb he wrote for Jill’s book, available here; and the text of Alison Croggon’s insightful launch of the collection back in November 2015, available here.

If you don’t already have to hand a copy of Breaking the Days, go to our titles page to get yours.

Following much anguish (and a delay for which we thank everyone for their patience), we are very pleased to announce that the winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize for 2015 is Carmen Leigh Keates.

We were impressed with the imaginative explorations of Carmen’s poems set in northern Europe – poems in which ancient ruins and contemporary museum alike are part of a disturbing yet subtly lyrical personal archaeology of place and space. Congratulations Carmen!

A collection of Carmen’s poems will be published by Whitmore Press in the second half of 2016.

We again thank all who submitted to this year’s prize, and in particular congratulate those who reached the shortlist and made our final decision an engrossingly difficult one.

After much deliberation, here, in alphabetical order, are the shortlisted poets in this year’s Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize:

Broede Carmody
Steve Evans
Adam Ford
Rachael Wenona Guy
Carmen Leigh Keates
Carolyn Leach-Paholski
Ray Liversidge
Roberta Lowing
Juliana Qian (Lia Incognita)
Jane Williams

As ever, our thanks to all who entered. Many other good works from good poets didn’t make the list, but we hope they make someone else’s list in the very near future.

We also know that, due to various work commitments, we took longer than usual this year to reach this point, so we thank everyone very much for their forbearance. We’ll try to reach the point of announcing a winner much more quickly.