Dan Disney was named the overall winner of the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize at an online ceremony on 19 January 2023 for his poem ‘periferal, fantasmal’.
The Porter Prize – Australia’s most prestigious poetry competition – is worth a total of $10,000. This year’s judges – Sarah Holland-Batt,
Des Cowley and James Jiang – shortlisted five poems by Chris Andrews (NSW), Chris Arnold (WA), Michelle Cahill (NSW), Dan Disney (South Korea/Australia), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). The shortlisted poems were selected from 1,132 entries sent from thirty-four countries. They appear in the January–February issue of ABR.
The judges said this of ‘periferal, fantasmal’: ‘A tour de force of linguistic estrangements, “periferal, fantasmal” excavates the colonial history sedimented in the names that litter the landscape of the Gippsland region in Victoria. Through its comic neologisms and deft calibrations of lyric temporality, the poem replays the sanction for mineral extraction provided by exonymic nomination, reminding us of the scotch-soaked nightmare from which we are still trying to awake.’
On learning of his win, Dan Disney commented: ‘Peter Porter opens his poem “Landscape with Orpheus” with an epigraph from The Magic Flute – “You only live once, let that be enough for you!”. Poems like Porter’s generate not only wonder but also awed awareness (and, for me, a shift thereafter towards ethical, experimental rhetoric). I am dazzled to be in the bright reality of a moment like this. It is an incredible honour to receive a prize bearing the name of such a prodigiously enlivening, humanising poet.’
About Dan Disney
Dan Disney’s most recent collection of poems, accelerations & inertias, (Vagabond Press 2021), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. Together with Matthew Hall, he is the editor of New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (Palgrave 2021). He teaches with the English Depart- ment at Sogang University, in Seoul. Dan has been shortlisted for the Porter Prize on three other occasions.
Further information
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize honours the life and work of the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010), an honoured contributor to ABR for many years. For more information about the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, or to read the 2023 shortlisted poems, please visit the ABR website.
We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Morag Fraser AM and Andrew Taylor AM and support in memory of Kate Boyce.
