We are thrilled to announce that Eunice Andrada is the winner of the 2018 AP X NAHR Eco-Poetry Fellowship. Eunice will take up residency in the village of Sottochiesa, Taleggio Valley, northern Italy, over the month of June 2018. It has been an absolute pleasure partnering with NAHR again for this award, and we look forward to the poetic work which will arise from this for Eunice.
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet, journalist, lyricist and teaching artist based in Sydney. Featured in The Guardian, CNN International, ABC News and other media, she has performed her poetry in diverse international stages, from the Sydney Opera House and the deserts of Alice Springs to the United Nations Climate Negotiations in Paris. During a residency in Canada’s prestigious Banff Centre, she collaborated with award-winning jazz musician and Cirque du Soleil vocalist Malika Tirolien. She has also shared her verses with celebrated composer Andrée Greenwell for the choral project Listen to Me. Eunice co-produced, curated and featured in Harana, a series of poetry tours led by Filipina-Australians in response to the Passion and Procession exhibition in the Art Gallery of NSW. Her work has been translated into Tagalog, Hiligaynon, French, Japanese, and Czech, while her poems have appeared in Peril magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Verity La, Voiceworks, and Deep Water Literary Review, amongst other publications. She was awarded the John Marsden & Hachette Australia Poetry Prize in 2014. In 2018, the Amundsen-Scott Station in the South Pole of Antarctica will feature her poetry in a special exhibition on climate change. Flood Damages is her first book of poetry, available for pre-order now.
A special thank you the jurors Dan Disney, Anne Elvey and last year’s AP X NAHR inaugural winner, Simon Eales.
Judges’ comments:
This year’s NAHR/ Australian Poetry Prize fielded numerous exceptional entries, and a number of applications made particularly persuasive links situating projects within Sottochiesa. Alongside high calibre creatively literate folios, the judges – Anne Elvey, Simon Eales, and Dan Disney – found the best applications to propose sophisticated engagements with this year’s theme of water. All shortlisted applicants presented methodological approaches to investigating the leakage, flow, or/and babble coursing through Val Taleggio; the best applications remained mindful of biopolitical and ecopoetic concerns, while remaining careful not to allow methodological dimensions to foreclose on the heuristics of creative exploration.
Noteworthy applications this year included Shastra Deo’s proposal to investigate embodiment, trauma, and evolution through reading watery “surface[s] as well as the scales and skin of what lives within it;’’ Angela Gardner’s nuanced, lush poems continue to probe interstices between “culture” and “nature;” and Dave Drayton’s conceptually enigmatic, Oulipo-inflected defamiliarizations again grabbed our attention. Congratulations to these three shortlisted applicants. Other ethically-engaged, praiseworthy applications came from Alison Coppe, Lesley Synge, Steven James Finch, and Anthony London.
The winner of this year’s prize, Eunice Andrada, promises textual and sound-based creative outcomes which will respond to themes of “water, diaspora, and the symbiotic relationship of ethnolects and ecology” in and around Sottochiesa. The judges were impressed by the Sydney-based Filipina poet’s proposal to “interrogate the ways in which water shapes and transmits the meanings, poeticisms and musicalities of language across countries and communities” and, for this multi-lingual and transcultural creative producer, we feel a month in Sottochiesa will create opportunity for novel syncretic results. In the application, Andrada also demonstrates how previous residencies have resulted fortuitously in exciting new collaborations, and we hope her time in Lombardy will create similar opportunities to explore new communities and new spaces, as well as new modes opening onto enriched creative investigation.
Anne Elvey, Simon Eales, Dan Disney