ECU PhD candidate Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon has been shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Image credit Brett Leigh Dicks
A poem by Edith Cowan University (ECU) PhD candidate Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon has been shortlisted for Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is an internationally recognised literary award and one of the most prestigious prizes for a single poem in the world.
Her poem, "Immigration Triction" is one of five poems shortlisted internationally from a vast field of 1,066 entries in 21 countries.
Natalie said she was thrilled to be nominated for such a highly competitive and respected award.
"I've been submitting to this prize for several years, so I'm pretty stoked to make the shortlist," she said.
"Immigration Triction" was written as part of Natalie's PhD collection of erasure poems on cultural and historical forgetting.
Natalie explained that erasure poetry is where you take an existing text and white-out or black-out portions of that text to create a poem from the words left behind on the page.
"In my PhD poetry collection, "The Commonwealth of Amnesia", I have taken newspaper articles and historic documents relating to Croatian and Yugoslav people in Australia and erased them to create poems about forgotten histories of this group of people," she said.
Natalie's poem "Immigration Triction" is an erasure of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, commonly known as the White Australia policy.
"This white-out erasure is my attempt to re-narrativise this policy and its damaging effects on not only Asian immigrants and Pacific Islanders, but on minority ethnic groups not considered 'white' at the time, like Croatians," Natalie said.
Natalie will read her poem at an online ceremony on Tuesday 23 January where the winner of the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize will be announced. The Prize is worth a total of $10,000 in which the overall winner will receive $6,000.
For further information about the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, visit the Australian Book Review website.
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is a writer, songwriter, and educator who was raised on a farm by her Croatian-immigrant parents. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer's Digest (US). Natalie's work has been widely anthologised in both the United States and Australia. She has won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize (2018) and the KSP Poetry Prize (2019). Her début poetry collection, First Blood, was released in 2019 (Ginninderra Press). Her second poetry book, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, on motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency, was released in 2023 by Life Before Man/Gazebo Books.
