Congratulations to UWA Publishing poets Kaya Ortiz and Isabella G. Mead on being shortlisted for the Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry.
The Five Islands Prize runs annually, supporting emerging poets and honouring the publishers who have shown confidence in new poets, and is administered by Kevin Brophy AM.
The full shortlist is as follows and was announced in November 2025:
Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim (Cordite Publishing)
Portraits of Drowning by Madeleine Dale (UQP)
The Infant Vine by Isabella G. Mead (UWAP)
Past & Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz (UWAP)
Congratulations Kaya and Isabella!
From the judges
Commended (joint) The Infant Vine by Isabella G. Mead
In The Infant Vine Isabella G. Mead invites the reader into a world both intimate and vast, familiar and utterly strange. She creates exquisitely crafted poems out of the visceral experience of birth and the surreal exhaustion of parenting, in conversation with art, with animals, with the sublime power of the more-than-human. The irresolvable tension between life’s beauty and its griefs are held. Such as the poem “The Grasshopper” where a child’s wondrous gaze is written alongside the threat and horror of climate disaster. Mead is a writer with a luminous eye for detail. Pay attention, her poetry insists, slow down and heed what you might be missing. There is also wry humour in this collection, often found in the incongruous collisions of the mundanity of parenthood with the demands of life. An ‘ideal dinner party’ envisioned as one where ‘I won’t be interrupted’, where ‘I refuse all guests’. There is a hymn-like quality to this collection, such that we hear each carefully composed line and become tuned to the rich sonics of them in concert with each other. Mead’s voice is clarion. the infant vine is a book that readers will return to multiple times. Each reading deepens the richness of language and ideas and keeps offering that invitation of slow, careful, sacred attention.
Commended (joint) Past & Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz
Past & Parallel Lives articulates a new dimension of Australian poetry. Clear eyed and prescient, it maps nascent horizons for queer becoming and for anyone intent on excavating their truth. Ortiz is determined to coax the marrow from language, naming and renaming the nameless, never satisfied with a false singularity. The poems are formally dextrous — deft manifestations of their own internal impulses. They impress as technically robust inventions that wholeheartedly claim the page, holographic diagrams that demonstrate how to plot an honest course through the cosmos. They birth a mythology out of loss and hunger, sensitive to tradition but always questioning the given. Ortiz approaches revelation through the kaleidoscopic mundane — grounded in natural longing while turning to meet grace where it lives. A travelogue rich with multidimensional knowing, this collection provides a guide for self fashioning which, while always attentive to the trauma of birth, celebrates above all else the impulse to live. Past & Parallel Lives returns from the future and from the past with a message of joyous resilience and queer homecoming. We can’t wait to read more.
