UWA Publishing is delighted to announce that Susan Fealy has won the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry for her debut collection, Flute of Milk. Flute of Milk is published by UWA Publishing’s poetry imprint, UWAP Poetry. The prize was announced at the 2017 Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday 26 August.
The Wesley Michel Wright Prize is administered by the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre and Faculty of Arts, and is worth $4,000. The prize is for a poem or poems between 50 and 500 lines published in the last 12 months. Previous winners include extracts of Nothing Sacred by Linda Weste; The Special by David Stavanger; and The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson. The 2017 prize was judged by Associate Professor Justin Clemens, Dr Jeanine Leane, and Dr James Jiang.
Upon receiving the award, Susan Fealy said, ‘to a writer, prize money means time for writing, and there is no greater gift! As an honours graduate from the University of Melbourne, it is a particular joy to receive a prize from the place where I spent some of the happiest days of my life: filled with the excitement of new learning, new possibilities, the expansion of discovery and the life of the mind.’
Susan Fealy is a poet, writer and clinical psychologist based in Melbourne. She began writing and publishing poetry in 2007 and was a managing co-editor a Five Islands Press from 2009 to 2010. Her poems have been published widely in Australian journals, newspapers and anthologies, including in The Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010, and 2013. She was the recipient of the 2010 Kendall Poetry Award and the 2013 Society of Women Writers National Poetry Prize.
Image credit: Nicholas Walton-Healey.
