Winner & Highly Commended Announcement
We’re so pleased to announce the winner of the 2026 Theresa Matheson Bequest Award is Lily Egan for her poem Aftertaste. As part of the Award, Lily Egan and Lucy Van have completed an hour of mentorship. We’re so excited for you all to read the remarkable poem below!
Winner
Lily Egan
‘Aftertaste’
Lily Egan is a writer and university student with a passion for poetry and creative nonfiction. Her writing explores the intricacies of human relationships, memory, identity, and the small moments that shape our understanding of ourselves and others. Drawn to the intersection of the personal and the literary, she is interested in the ways language can give form to experiences that are often difficult to articulate. Through poetry and essay writing, Lily seeks to examine the ordinary with curiosity, finding meaning in the details, contradictions and silences of everyday life. She is currently studying Communications at the University of Technology Sydney, where she continues to develop her voice as a writer.
Highly Commended
Misa Hang
‘I want to be a cube of sugar’
Misa is an emerging writer based in Naarm. Misa’s first poem was shortlisted for the 2023 Dorothy Porter Award for Emerging Poets. Since then, Misa has been published in the University of Melbourne’s Nature Human Dialogue and the University of Queensland’s Jacaranda Journal.
Lucy Phillips
‘LEPTOCEPHALUS’
Lucy Phillips is a queer nonbinary writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction living in Magandjin (Brisbane) on unceded land. They will graduate from the University of Queensland later this year with a Bachelor of Arts, and have previously had creative nonfiction work published in Sprig Magazine
Judge’s Report
We thank everyone who entered this year and Lucy Van for reading, judging and mentoring:
“Wow! So many wonderful poets have entered the Theresa Matheson Bequest Award. How good it is to see the poems where language surrenders to new + lively fascinations. How good it is to see poets summoning risk, eschewing contrivance, opening to deeper possibilities of style. I read many poems that made me think of their poets, ‘well, I guess I’ll see you soon!’ – the unpublished poets will surely not remain so for long. I’d like to thank everyone who entered and say: always be entering!
The poems I shortlisted were the ones that I found myself remembering often, and often away from my desk. There was a slight paradox to work through here: the most decisive poem would probably be in least need of mentorship (which is one part of this award). In the end, I could not turn away from Lily Egan’s ‘Aftertaste,’ a rather stunning expression of the circuitry of desire (say, anticipation-memory-exposure-concealment). This poem feels beautifully indebted to lyric tradition while at the same time voicing something fresh + powerful: it commands my fullest attention and is the winning entry. There are also two highly commended poems. Misa Hang’s ‘I want to become a cube of sugar’ is an outstanding visual poem with subtly realised political valences, rewarding the many subsequent readings it entices. Lucy Phillips’
‘LEPTOCEPHALUS’ similarly drew me back many times for – among other things – the way its lines break, a gorgeous combination of elegance and force.”
A huge thank you to everyone who entered the competition — we were thrilled to see even more entries in our 2nd year of the Award. Our deepest gratitude to Lucy Van for her deep and thoughtful reading of the entries, as well as to the Award benefactor Julie Matheson for her support in making this prize possible.
WINNING POEM
AFTERTASTE
You laugh and it leaves salt on my upper lip;
an invisible texture I check for with my thumb.
There’s a cut on your finger you keep pressing
against the rim of the glass
though you are not drinking.
We’re sitting close on your kitchen floor,
knees close touching, backs against a cabinet
that doesn’t close properly, chairs tucked away,
as if someone else might come in and need them.
The glasses between us have gone warm,
a ring forming underneath them,
spreading into the wood.
You tell the same story about the train,
but the ending shifts—
just enough that I feel it catch
a thorn snagged in fabric.
The way you watch me after,
like waiting for something to return.
I press my tongue flat to the roof of my mouth
as if I could find it there.
I nod too quickly.
Say something and let it pass.
Later, at the sink, I let the water run longer than I need to,
cup it in my mouth, hold it there.
It doesn’t clear.
There is still a texture—
not flavour, not quite,
something that refuses to dissolve.
You ask me something then stop halfway through it,
the sentence collapsing under its own weight.
For a moment neither of us moves.
The kitchen hums softly around us —
fridge motor, distant traffic, the small sound of your nail
catching against the side of the glass
.
I think of saying your name just to hear how it lands here,
but even that feels rehearsed.
So instead we sit inside the pause,
letting it widen naturally,
until it becomes difficult to tell
whether anything has actually ended
or if we have only stopped holding it in place.
The Theresa Matheson Bequest Award 2026, now in its second year, is an Award for poets who have not had a poem published, outside self-publication or via Social Media. The Award, with a prize of $1,000 for the successful poet, has been established to honour the memory of Theresa Matheson (1972-2022) by her sister, Julie. Theresa was herself a prolific poet, but had not published a poem in her lifetime. This is an annual award administrated by the national poetry body, Australian Poetry.