It’s not long ago that Amy Crutchfield would have been entering her poems for emerging-writers awards. Not any more. And she can dispense with any use of that emerging adjective after her first book, The Cyprian, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.
“Being a poet is like a life of self-doubt,” she said. “And I feel this will give me 48 hours, maybe even a week of rock-solid confidence. There have been a lot of other awards this year, none of which I got, and I think probably the safest thing is to apply the same approach to the ones that you get as the ones you don’t, which is ‘back to the desk’.”
Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners Andre Dao (left) and Amy Crutchfield at Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
There were six Prime Minister’s awards presented at the National Library in Canberra, with each winner receiving $80,000 tax-free. Other winners were:
- Fiction, André Dao, Anam;
- Non-fiction, Daniel Browning, Close to the Subject: Selected Works;
- Young-adult literature, Will Kostakis, We Could Be Something;
- Children’s literature, Violet Wadrill et al, Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country;
- Australian history, Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the Lucky Country.
Our review said ABC broadcaster Browning’s cultural, personal and political essays revealed “storytelling to be the most expansive, all-embracing of forms”. We described Kostakis’ book as a “queer YA novel full of heart and humour”. The award judges said Tamarra was “a truly original story with beautiful artwork that takes readers on an educational and cultural journey”. And the review in this masthead said Donald Horne was “an impressive biography, impeccably researched and beautifully crafted. In its scope, detail, and fluency, it is comparable to the best biographies of George Orwell.”
The Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners at Parliament House: (from front left) Leah Leaman, Daniel Browning, Will Kostakis, Gregory Crocetti; (and from left) Ryan Cropp, Andre Dao, Cecelia Edwards, Penny Smith and Amy Crutchfield.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Crutchfield began the poems that became The Cyprian more than 10 years ago. She realised the overarching themes were love and death and the connection between them. She uses the figure of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, as a sort of framework for considering further questions of lust, misogyny, art and sex.
She wanted to look at love from functional and dysfunctional angles. “Some of them are quite twisted forms of love. There’s a kind of sexual violence and so obviously that’s not love in its normal sense, except that sometimes in those situations one person’s mind is so screwed up that it is a kind of love thing for them.”
But there are also poems about painters Pablo Picasso and Pierre Bonnard, and the former’s lovers Dora Maar and Marie-Therese Walter, and the latter’s obsession over more than 20 years with Young Women in the Garden, a painting that featured his lover, who took her own life, and his wife. Crutchfield also has a poem about the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which killed all 298 people on board, which she describes as being about a “more tenuous connection to love … I have my own ideas about how that actually is about love, but they [the poems] connect with it in different ways”.
