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Drawing by Nazi Sadiqi/Jesuit Refugee Service

The 2022 BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry Prize winners!

The 2022 BR4R Seeking Asylum Poetry prize has now closed, and the judging has been finalised. 

BR4R is pleased to announce that six prizes have been awarded, and twenty-one other poems have been commended. The full list of winning and commended poems will be published on the website and in our partner journal, Social Alternatives, by the end of this year.

This year we have received more entries than previously, including many more entries from asylum seekers and refugees, and, for the first time, many entries from young people.

BR4R extends a warm thank you to our judge this year, Juan Garrido Salgado, former political prisoner from Chile (1985), Poet, Translator and Activist. 

BR4R joins Juan’s congratulations to the winners and commended poets. He describes the poems as being very moving, strong, painful and beautiful expressions of personal stories, and he notes that he is seeing new voices in our poetical lives and writing in Australia.


First prize winner in the under-18 category: Rose Mealing, A Sea of Pain
Guns firing
People screaming
Babies crying
Then darkness

Awaking to the sound of water
As a boat takes you away
From that fear, pain and heartache
A small ship with 70 people onboard

Now no land in sight
Just an endless watery grave
Losing hope quickly
Only trying not to drown

People all around you
Crying for their loss
Their once beautiful country
Now covered in a fiery blaze

First prize winner in asylum seeker and refugee category: Afeif Ismail, My Name is Nadya 
My name is Nadya, listen to my song
What didn’t kill me has made me strong


One night I awoke to laments and screams
At first, I thought I was still in my dreams
But then I saw terror on the face of my father
‘Run like the wind!’ cried my terrified grandmother

As she ran her fear blew the dust from her years
Above, Antonov planes roared in our ears
Our huts were burning as they dropped their Hell
‘Hide behind this tree’, I heard my grandmother yell

The Janjaweed laughed, those devil horsemen,
Killing and raping, again and again
Newborn babes weren’t spared this nightmare
Pierced on swords, they were tossed in the air

My grandmother’s feet were scratched and bled
‘You must leave me, run into the desert,’ she said
She hugged and kissed me, then pushed me away
As bombs erupted higher than their horses’ neigh

I ran all night from the Janjaweed swords
Ringing in my ears were grandmother’s words
I cried and screamed for the family I’d lost
The response was an echo like a winter night’s frost

Like a ghost in the desert I walked under the sun
I could still hear the distant shout of a gun
Hurt with hunger and thirst, I could barely walk
At noon I sheltered under the shade of a rock

My name is Nadya, listen to my song
What didn’t kill me has made me strong


I lived in a refugee camp but I was free
Grandmother died under a buckthorn tree
For three long years now we’ve been apart
Every day I still miss her, but she’s here in my heart.

Overall first prize winner: Paul Hetherington, Oranges and Bell Tower
The orchard was littered
with fallen oranges;
fear and anger
fumed in hot air.
Now we’re told
not to speak of such things,
as if goblins have risen
to stand before us
with flattening accents.
Our language tastes
of black ink and wire
and I turn in my hands
a mouldy orange—
as if it’s tainted
by congestive words.
In my homeland
a gunship circles
the green, laden trees.

*

Procedures march on.
I clear my throat
but no-one wants
to hear of a bell tower
shattered by bombing
or the coruscations
of broken vowels.
In this tribunal
the allotted minutes
quickly pass.
I’m escorted within
a closed corridor;
remove my belt,
take off clothes.
Addressed by a name
that isn’t my own,
I’m told to step forwards;
told to stand back.
The vistas close
like a storyteller
arriving too soon
at the end of a poem,
swinging at silence
like a tongueless bell.

*

At last I take memory
into an orchard
surrounded by farmland.
A five-year wait
to stand among oranges
in clearing air;
to plant and tether
some dignity.
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