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Julie Janson: My Kaathi Sister
We are proud to announce the arrival of Julie Janson's debut poetry collection. JULIE JANSON, a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal nation, who lives on the south coast of NSW, will be well-known to many as an acclaimed novelist and playwright. She has had ten plays produced professionally in Australia, Indonesia and USA. Gunjies was nominated for an AWGIE Award and received a Highly Commended Award from the Human Rights Commission; Eyes of Marege, a collaboration with Te
23 hours ago
All That Could Be Lost: Sydney & Canberra
On 20 June, All That Could Be Lost, Melanie Jansen’s debut poetry collection, will be formally launched by eminent poet and 5Islands Press Managing Editor, Mark Tredinnick, at the beautiful Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf. We invite you to join us for an evening of poetry and conversation. Imagine a child is fighting for life in intensive care. Imagine that you need to decide how--and sometimes whether--to treat that child. Imagine how it feels to tell the parents the crisis is
24 hours ago
A Panoply of Poems You Cant Afford to Miss
Just out this week is Jonathan Cant's Finding Pan. You will not have read of book of poems quite like this one. Finding Pan is a journey of discovery: verbal, thematic, tonal and formal. The exhilaration of Jonathan’s wordplay is infectious and intoxicating. Words are rarely left as he finds them, but walked around and re-applied, taken apart and reconstructed, hidden parts of them revealed. As Audrey Molloy has written, “Rarely in contemporary Australian poetry do we find t
May 9
A Gray Day Out
By a very happy coincidence, Australian Book Review chose to publish Mark Tredinnick's excellent essay on Robert Gray in the same week as 5 Islands Press opened submissions the 2026 Robert Gray Prize for poetry. Mark, as some of you will know, knew Robert Gray well, and was a great admirer and promoter of his work. Last year, he conceived, coordinated and edited Bright Crockery Days —a festschrift in Gray's honour. Twenty-four literary luminaries each contributed an essay on
The Ease of Eggs: Nourishment for the Soul
This week, we celebrate the arrival of Benjamin Dodd's third poetry collection, The Ease of Eggs . The world Dodds witnesses and recalls in these tidy, playful lyric poems has a dignity and courtesy and unexpected kindness. And what a various, surprising and surprisingly tender world it is. As Carol Jenkins has written: "This book ... is a cabinet of the eclectic: school observations, the universe at large, men and gender, cinematic culture, science at work. But always we a
Definitely A Woman We Should Listen To
A Woman Talks to Her Tongue speaks of a family, its secrets and silences, unacknowledged griefs and inherited traumas. Written from the point of view of the fifth child in a complex family, the early poems catch and release a few moments in a daughter’s life, from her early childhood to parenthood. The second section of the book is a kind and passionate cry for truth-telling, femininity and creativity, and includes a series of remarkable monologues that examine silence and b
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