Alisha Brown is a poet living on unceded Gadigal Country. She won the 2025 Finding Beauty Poetry Prize and the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize, placed second in the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published or forthcoming in Best of Australian Poems, Palette Poetry, Westerly, Griffith Review, Island, Cordite, and Meanjin, among others.
Alisha's manuscript A Bird is a Small God has been shortlisted for the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award. In this short interview, with Mabel Gibson, Alisha Brown shares how it feels to be shortlisted and their advice for writers looking to submit to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future.
About A Bird is a Small God: A Bird is a Small God is my debut collection of literary ecopoetry. It explores recovery from illness, deep ecology, memory, myth, and magic through my relationship with the natural world – primarily the coastal bush on Yuin Country and the dry scrub of Gamilaroi land. It sees bodily grief as an extension of ecological grief and asks how we can survive global and personal crises without losing our capacity for wonder. Above all, these poems are awestruck, earnest devotions to the earth as a magnificent answer to the question of meaning.
Mabel Gibson interviewed Alisha about her shortlisting:
How do you feel being shortlisted for the 2026 DHA?
I'm thrilled beyond belief that the judges were touched by my manuscript. I wrote so many of these poems when I was extremely ill and isolated, lying in bed and watching the birds from my window, so it feels intimate and precious that they've been received so warmly. Being shortlisted has certainly boosted my confidence in the strength of this collection and I'm very excited for it to find a home.
How long have you been working on A Bird is a Small God and what made you submit to the DHA this year?
I began working on this manuscript in 2020 when I was bedbound with ME/CFS, and I wrote it over the course of six years as my health improved and I slowly re-entered the world. I decided to submit to the DHA because I admire the work of previous DHA recipients and would be honoured for A Bird is a Small God to sit beside them. I also respect UWAP as a publishing house and really like the idea that my book could potentially be printed on Australia’s west coast – though I’ve never been, it features so gorgeously in Tim Winton’s writing, which has influenced my own practice a great deal.
A Bird is a Small God is a collection of poetry which you have called ecopoetry. Could you tell us what ecopoetry is and how you’ve used it to explore human mortality and grief?
For me, ecopoetry is poetry about the living world. I know that’s rather vague because you could argue that everything is alive – from the billions of bacteria wriggling around in train carriages to the long, slow life of a stone. But that’s kind of the point. I think ecopoetry is about paying attention to the inherent aliveness of things in ways we might normally miss. It offers a certain quality of awareness – a seeing-ness, an open-eyed curiosity about worlds within worlds within worlds. Ecopoems are poems that love the earth and tell about it. I write about nature when I write about grief because the land has always held me so beautifully when I’m struggling. You can be having the worst day of your life, but then a dragonfly lands on your finger, or the light falls through the trees just so, and suddenly you’re saved. I also find it much easier to accept my own impermanence when I witness the cycles of birth, death, and decay around me. I see how orb spiders build and rebuild their webs. I watch the tides move in and out. I bury my dog and a gum tree grows from his body. Loss has felt much less personal since I’ve come to understand it as an exchange – who knows what trees I’ll grow someday or which critters I’ll feed with my compost.
Do you have any advice for writers who have been working on a manuscript and are considering submitting their work into the DHA in the future?
My biggest piece of advice is to back yourself! It can be so hard to gauge the merit of your own work, and it’s easy to be self-critical as a writer, but the DHA is such a unique opportunity to be recognised for an unpublished manuscript – you should absolutely go for it. Be patient with your process, too, and don’t be discouraged if it takes years for your book to feel finished. God knows it took me forever. Remember that cicadas spend seven years underground waiting for the perfect rainfall before surfacing. Trust your timing.
Check out our interviews with the other 5 shortlisted writers: