At the Altar of Touch wins the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry
We're thrilled to share the news that Gavin Yuan Gao's poetry collection At the Altar of Touch has won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Congratulations, Gavin!
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards acknowledge the contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This is the first year that the awards have been delivered by Creative Australia, following the release of the Australian Government’s 2023 National Cultural Policy, Revive: a place for every story a story for every place.
At the Altar of Touch is a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity. It also won the 2020 Thomas Shapcott Award.
The richly allusive poems in this collection weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.
Prime Minister's Literary Award, judges' comments:
At the Altar of Touch is an intensely lyrical, intimate and expansive collection of poems. Here, in their debut collection, Gavin Yuan Gao deploys striking imagery and layered metaphor to find a path through suffering towards connection and belonging.
The poems range from heartbreaking elegies to the poet’s mother, tenderly erotic queer love poems, unsettling accounts of bullying and endurance, and ecstatic odes to desire and the natural world. Throughout, the language is associative, yet controlled and immersive, sweeping the reader up in the sensations and meanings held in the body.
The book incorporates, adapts and reimagines cultural touchstones as diverse as blind Chinese folk musician Abing, Telemachus from Greek mythology, Wordsworth, Rachmaninoff, and My Fair Lady. It is invigorating and enlightening, gently subverting our sense of the division of Eastern and Western aesthetics. But the poems also directly tackle, with nuance and courage, acutely contemporary experiences of racism in public places.
Gao’s poems are sinuous and sensual, drawing on archetypal motifs to deepen the resonance of the personal and familial. At the Altar of Touch is an achingly beautiful, rewarding ode to persistence and passion and is a startling poetic debut.