2026 Manuscript Prize - Flying Islands Pocket Poets

About the Competition

With the activity of poetry-making central to its efforts, Flying Islands particularly aims to bring experienced and new poets together on and off-line, through mentoring, art events of various kinds, workshops, blogs, websites, readings, launches and most importantly, through the ongoing publication of the Flying Island Pocket Poets Series. The Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets is part of this process.

SPONSORED BY:
Discipline of English and Writing, The University of Sydney.

The prize

The prize for the competition is $1000 cash, publication in the Flying Island Pocket Poets Series (with thirty free copies to the poet) and the possibility of negotiating a short writer’s residency at Arbaro Writers and Artists Residency. Other finalists may also be offered publication in the Flying Island Pocket Poets Series.

Timeline

Competition opens: 1 March 2026
Entries close: 30 April 2026
Longlist announced: June 2026
Shortlist announced: July 2026
Winner announced: August 2026

Competition for 2026 now closed

Jean Kent’s ‘IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE’

from The Language of Light

My nieces and nephews are chasing me up the wall.
In my mother’s house they are mustered
year by year, just as I was: A.J.C. 30/8/63
(five foot two) pencil brands in paint.

Heels tight against the floor ankles strained
careless as shanghais they aim themselves up
quiver as their grandmother
flattens curly heads with the carving knife
& pins them like chrysalises to the wall.

(1963. My two brothers straight as arrows
shoot past me, threatening the ceiling where possums
and cobwebs hide the bullseye. Our first year
in this house. I had done all my growing.
I had left it climbing with small sharp feet in the houses
which came before. My brothers with their eyes on the sky
stuck their fingers to skin-thin balsa, floated model
aeroplanes over their beds and over the paddock
of palely shooting carnation-leaved stock feed;
talked of piloting jets, Mathematics permitting.
I began to look horizontally as far
as America in full colour copies of Life:
John F. Kennedy with a fatal, choirboy grin.)

1981. Up the wall now delicate as insects
my nieces and nephews leave their marks.
Somewhere in the flat distance, patterns of houses
like nomads’ tents — at the heart of each
one single pole a ladder
of wounded paint. In the steamy dust
the deserts we planned to cross wait still.
Memories, slick mirages, blind us. Here all our lives
settle back to this: on a wall, marks
of moths’ feet, reaching for the sky.