Bad Westerns is an unpublished poetry collection that is shortlisted for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. In this short interview, with UWA Publishing intern Reilly McGrath, Tim Loveday shares how it feels to be shortlisted and his advice for writers looking to submit to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future.
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Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation and climate collapse. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, came runner-up in the 2024 Cloncurry Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, the 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize, the 2024 Best Australian Yarn and the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Tim teaches creative writing at Unimelb and RMIT. He is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at Unimelb. Find out more at: timloveday.com
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Bad Westerns takes an unflinching look at toxic masculinity as it intersects with climate collapse and so-called Australian identity. In Part I ‘FOR[]FATHER’ the image of the father & son embodies regional masculinities and their ritualisations through settler-colonial ideology. Part 2 ‘POWER [BROKER]’ situates masculine violence within Western expansionism, while Part 3 ‘[ACA]LIGHT’ humorously untangles the ways in which institutions obfuscate masculine dogma. In Part 4 ‘[REC]OVER’, notions of recovery and forgiveness are subverted, undermined. Bad Westerns then asks us a question more intimate, political and pressing than ever: is it possible to depart the house of a violent father? The 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award judges commented "Singing with the many vocabularies of masculinity in rural Australia, Bad Westerns is a deceptively rough book of poetry and a skilled lyric exploration of the interplay of violence and tenderness. Avoiding anthropocentrism, Bad Westerns insists on considering how these human interactions are embedded, intertwined and encroaching on the extra-than-human."
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UWA Publishing intern, Reilly McGrath, interviewed Tim about his shortlisting:
Reilly: What does being shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award mean to you? Â
Tim: Being shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award is a profound and moving affirmation of over 7 years of work, with some of the poems found within Bad Westerns having been drafted as far back as 2017. What is there to say then about this moment, this generous recognition? I’m flawed, shook; I’m as inflated and over-budget as a bad western. Thanks to all the judges and administrators of this prize. You’ve made a poet believe, if only for a moment, that anything is possible.’Â
Reilly: How long have you been working on this piece, and what made you want to submit to the DHA this year? Â
Tim: I’ve been working on Bad Westerns for about 7 years. Over that time, it's taken many forms, from verse novel to braided essays to a poetry collection – I even briefly dreamt of turning one poem into a conventional memoir. I submitted a much earlier iteration of it to the DHA some years ago – albeit under a different name – and received a blanket rejection for it then. Fair enough! It was half-cocked at that point. I finished this version – one I’m finally happy with – around the time that the 2025 DHA was closing and it felt like something akin to fate. Â
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Reilly: Do you have any advice for writers considering submitting their work in to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future?
Tim: I guess my advice is that if you believe in a project, commit to it. Dig in and anticipate the long haul. There aren’t any shortcuts with writing. It’ll find its feet eventually or it won’t. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, then two years later go searching the garden for the baby (or the bathwater). That’s been my practice, though I suspect there are better ways. All this to say that writing's all about true grit. Be arrogant—then humble yourself to the page. And along the way, expect a hell of a lot of rejection. Â
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Bad Westerns is an unpublished poetry manuscript shortlisted for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. The winner will be announced late July.
Reilly McGrath is a former Bachelor of Arts student from the University of Western Australia, with First Class Honours in English Literary Studies. Â
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Check out our interviews with the other 5 shortlisted writers:
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