Toby Fitch

From a pool of nearly 800 entries, judges Astrid Lorange, Ender Başkan and outgoing Overland poetry editor Toby Fitch have selected one outstanding winner and two runners-up. In addition to the many topics, issues and perspectives that poets submitting to the prize often examine —  work, class, history, economics, the media, gender, queerness, feminism, the body, the personal et al.

You have to unclip the world to think it from cloyed screen or scream words haste … Time moves further away from you Memory stifled the jonquils and you’re in a tube of dreams, swimming — Gig Ryan, “Southern Aurora” The act of doomscrolling a teeming amount of virtual content is widely familiar in the actual internet tube of dreams of 2025, yet poems have always been literature’s doomscrolls.

(for Tilda) I know something that I wouldn’t mind seeing extinct, I told Evie and Tilda, who were cuddling up to me in bed, Pusheens! – those blimpy, expensive soft toy cats plonked haughtily in toy shops (basically high-end retail therapy for children), whose proliferation in our kids’ den (like squishy boulders with squinty eyes, snuggly surfaces you can sink into, and which exude, as cultural theory suggests of cute things, a creepiness due to our implicit power over them) haunts me when I...