Poet, publisher and editor π.ο. (Pi-O) won the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award, honoring an author who has "made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition," Books+Publishing reported. Established by Patrick White with the proceeds from his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, the award is worth A$20,000 (about US$13,125).
Born in Greece in 1951, π.ο. immigrated with his family in 1954 to Australia. For the past 40 years, the poet has worked as a draughtsman to support his creative practice, which the judges said was "informed by his working-class, non-Anglo background and his anarchist politics."
According to award trustee Perpetual, the award honors π.ο.'s "achievements as a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene" as a publisher, editor and the author of many collections, including the epic works 24 hours; Fitzroy: The Biography; and Heide, which won the 2020 Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for poetry.
In addition to his work as a poet, π.ο. edited 925 and Unusual Work, magazines focusing on experimental literature, as well as Off the Road, an anthology of performance poetry (1985). He is also a publisher at Collective Effort press.
The judging committee said: "A pioneering practitioner of spoken word and performance poetry in Australia, π.ο. campaigned for its acceptance as a valid poetic form. On the page, his poems continue to display a lively and witty interest in spoken language: migrant idioms, working-class speech and Australian colloquialisms jostle and unsettle standard English in his work. Similarly, an encyclopedic range of sources--proverbs, science writing, historical documents, classical mythology and children's games to name a few--provide disparate linguistic elements that are juxtaposed in his poems to brilliant effect. The range and diversity of his registers remind us that π.ο. is always, and foremost, an intensely political writer."