The Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen's The Rot won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the overall prize of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, honoring Australian writing and administered by the Wheeler Centre on behalf of the premier of the state of Victoria, the Guardian reported. Check out the winners in all categories here.
Araluen, whose book also won the Indigenous writing category, received A$125,000 (about US$89,045), altogether. The judges praised The Rot as "a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising" and "a vital intervention in this country's cultural conversation."
"These poems were about witnessing a genocide and the feeling of inertia and grief and rage and passivity that sits in the body when you feel so powerless against our government's complicity in that genocide," Araluen said. "I had people get up and leave and shout at me and have a go at me … I shouted back and felt so enraged. But I had incredibly beautiful people coming up to me afterwards, some of them crying, saying the poems had helped them understand how they have been feeling."