Whitsundays Writers Festival’s Heart Awards Draw National Field, Signalling Growing Prestige

The Whitsundays Writers Festival’s Heart Awards Poetry Prize has closed its 2026 entry period with over 70 submissions from poets across Australia, a result that reflects the competition’s rapidly growing standing on the national literary calendar.

Entries arrived from every state and territory, spanning a remarkable breadth of styles and subject matter. From tightly crafted lyric poems to narrative ballads, comic verse, and formally experimental work.

Poets wrote on themes ranging from family and memory to landscape, migration, ageing, and the natural world, with several entrants drawing directly on the Whitsundays for inspiration.

“What’s struck us most this year is the sheer range,” said Richard Evans, Festival Program Director. “We’ve had entries that would sit comfortably in any major national anthology alongside deeply personal, place-rooted work that could only have been written by someone who knows the Whitsundays. That diversity, arriving from right across the country, tells us something important: poets around Australia are now watching what happens here.”

The judging process now underway has been designed to ensure every entry, regardless of style or form, is assessed fairly on its own merits. Rather than pitting a gentle bush ballad against an experimental free-verse piece, judges are applying a consistent, criteria-based framework across all 74 entries: purpose and coherence, technical craft, originality of voice, and emotional or intellectual impact. Each poem is scored independently against these standards before any comparison between entries takes place, a deliberate step to guard against the kind of style bias that can creep into literary judging.

“We wanted a process that was rigorous enough to stand up to scrutiny, but flexible enough to honour what each poet was actually trying to do,” Richard said. “A poem that sets out to tell a story shouldn’t be marked down for not being a tight lyric, and vice versa. Fairness means judging each work by its own ambitions.”

The competition will now proceed through two further stages before a winner is announced. A longlist will be released in coming weeks, followed by a shortlist as judging moves into its final round, with the eventual winners announced at the Whitsundays Writers Festival.