Cheryl Leavy wins the 2026 Porter Prize

Congratulations to Cheryl Leavy, from the Kooma and Nguri Nations in western and central Queensland, who was announced as the winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her poem Kumanjayi at a ceremony in Melbourne on Februrary 18. Leavy becomes the first First Nations winner of the prize. The Porter Prize is worth a total of $10,000, of which the winner receives $6,000. This year’s judges – Judith Bishop, ABR Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani – shortlisted five poems from 1,360 entries. Poets from thirty-two countries entered the prize.

The Judges said:

If the poems had a palette, its accent was the green of hope and healing, held gently in a wide range of poems speaking across time place.

Of the poem Kumanjayi, the judges said:

Pulsing between speaking and silence, anger and tenderness, the poem’s spare lyricism flares into moments of repetition. These reflect trauma’s return and return, in kind, steadily to ceremony and honouring. Beginning where anger meets violence, “Kumanjayi” turns to observance, tending the aftermath of violence across this “whole bloodied continent”. The poem works precisely with diction and lineation, preferring steady witness to metaphor, as though swept clear of distraction. Drawing the reader into its momentum, shifting pronouns invite witness and ask readers to consider whether, ancestrally or now, we are part of the “we” who gather to heal or the “they” who enact the violence, perhaps both. The poem’s first-person singular “I” steps in only after partaking in collective mourning and healing, quietly requesting permission to address and imagine the young Kumanjayi. In the year in which there have been the most Aboriginal deaths in custody since 1979, this necessary poem moves delicately and unswervingly towards justice.

We are delighted for Cheryl and we are excited to publish her forthcoming poetry collection Mudhunda that will include her Peter Porter Poetry Prize-winning poem.

Congratulations once again Cheryl on this prestigious win.

Cheryl Leavy is an award-winning writer from the Kooma and Nguri nations who is passionate about language revitalisation. Writing in both English and her critically endangered Kooma language, she has been published by Cordite, Griffith Review, Southerly, The Guardian, and in the University of Queensland Press anthology Words to Sing the World Alive. In 2022, Cheryl won the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry. She has recently completed her first poetry collection, titled Mudhunda – The Song Country, to be published in 2027. Cheryl’s dèbut bilingual picture book, Yanga Mother, was shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award and a Queensland Literary Award for a Work of State Significance.

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize honours the life and work of the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010), a contributor to ABR for many years. For more information about the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, or to read the 2026 shortlisted poems, please visit the ABR website.