Robert Adamson has been announced as the winner of the 2011 Patrick
White Award.
The prize was established by White in 1975, using the money he received when he became the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since then, the award has distributed around $750 000 to writers deemed to have made ‘a significant but inadequately recognised contribution to Australian literature'.
Adamson, described by the judges as ‘one of Australia's truly great poets of place', has published over 21 collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems and was the editor of Black Inc.’s Best Australian Poems in 2009 and 2010. He received $18 000 in prizemoney this year, and joins an alumni including David Foster, Gerald Murnane, Janette Turner Hospital and Thea Astley.
