Poet wins richest award

DESPITE not starting to write poetry until she was 50, Hobart’s Anna Murchison has claimed Australia’s richest poetry prize.

The 54-year-old was awarded the $10,000 Australian Catholic University’s Prize for Poetry for her poem Child of Gath-hepher.

The theme for this year’s prize was resilience and more than 700 entries were received.

Ms Murchison’s poem explores her feelings when her son Jonah recently needed urgent surgery and she suddenly had to fly from Tasmania to Melbourne between lockdowns to be with him.

“I think poetry allows us to access our emotions in deep and subterranean ways. Poetry allowed me to recapture the trauma and uncertainty of that time in a way that I think is different from what prose can do,” she said.

Ms Murchison said she still considers herself a “new and unschooled” writer, but winning the prize was confirmation that she was right to take the courageous step of becoming a writer.