“Australian poetry is emerging as one of the country’s most significant cultural achievements. There will come a time when the part played in this by the Newcastle Poetry Prize will be part of our national cultural history… No other city in Australia is so closely associated with such an important prize. The fact that Newcastle can manage a prize like this, and neither Sydney, nor Melbourne, for instance, can, is a matter for some wry observation.”

Martin Langford, NSW Poetry Development Officer.

In September 1980, poet Peter Goldman stood in the middle of Newcastle’s Civic Park during the September Mattara Festival and handed out an A4 photocopied anthology of poetry to passers-by. The collection featured poems from local Hunter writers, with contributors ranging in age from six to eighty-one.

This anthology provided the spark for the first official Mattara Poetry Prize in 1981, overseen by two young academics at the University of Newcastle. Chris Pollnitz and Paul Kavanagh secured funding for the Prize from the Hunter Water Board and convinced A D Hope and G A Wilkes to be judges.

From these modest beginnings, the Mattara prize quickly established itself as the richest and most prestigious stand-alone poetry competition in the country, and is now known as the Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Each year, hundreds of hopeful writers from around the country send their poems in to be assessed by a panel of eminent judges. The Newcastle Poetry Prize is particularly valued by the Australian poetry community for the anthology of the judges’ selection which is produced annually, offering poets a rare avenue for publication in an increasingly bleak publishing landscape.

More recently the Prize has included a New Media section, as part of the Prize organisers’ agenda to foster new directions in Australian poetry.

However, for most poets the most important feature of the Newcastle Poetry Prize is that it is judged blind and therefore provides a level playing field where existing reputations are confirmed and emerging talent gets a chance to break through.