Judith Nangala Crispin
The Dingo’s Noctuary
Puncher & Wattmann, 2025
Set against a backdrop of Australia’s central deserts, The Dingo's Noctuary explores themes of identity, belonging, and the fragile threads that connect all living beings. At the heart of the tale is a soul’s dark night, the flight of a lady motorcyclist, in the prime of her invisibility, and her mongrel dingo Moon, into the Tanami desert. She’s searching for a caravan of miraculous dog-headed beings, glimpsed in dreams and the dementia tales of an old desert lady.
The Dingo’s Noctuary is an illustrated verse novel, complete at 70,500 words. It includes accurate hand drawn maps of the Australian central deserts, pressings of rare plants, and forty-seven lumachrome glass prints, afterlife portraits of animals and birds. The story unfolds through combinations of poetry and prose, alongside visual images- maps of land and stars, plant pressings, and forty-seven afterlife portraits of animals and birds. It is a single-authored book in which the images and texts are equally weighted. The book was written over thirty-seven desert crossings, sometimes on the motorcycle with the dog on the back. The entire second half of the book was written on a typewriter after a motorcycle crash (the unsuccessful 37th crossing) left me unable to use a computer. I made a motorcycle blog about one of the journeys in this book here.
Work from The Dingo’s Noctuary has received a number of awards and prizes including the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. It was highly commended in the 2023 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Milburn Art Prize, the 2023 and 2025 Ravenswood Prizes for Australian Women’s Art, and the 2019 Olive Cotton Prize. Images and texts from this book were included in the Lunar Codex time-capsule which was deposited on the moon as part of the Blue Ghost mission in 2024. A mock-up of the complete book was shortlisted for the 2023 Arles Luma Recontres Dummy Book Prize.
About the Author
Judith Nangala Crispin is an acclaimed poet, visual artist, motorcyclist and volunteer firefighter, who lives on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country near Braidwood on the NSW Southern Tablelands. Her poetry has won the Blake Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for many awards including the Peter Porter Prize. Her visual art has won her residencies, awards, and wide acclaim, here and overseas. She has published two collections of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers and The Lumen Seed. Judith is a descendant of Bpangerang people from the Murray River and acknowledges heritage from Scotland, Ireland, France, Mali, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. She spends part of each year living and working with the Warlpiri, her adopted people, in the Northern Tanami Desert.
Dan Hogan
Secret Third Thing
Cordite Books, 2023
Secret Third Thing is a hyper-real comment on this hyper real moment: it is suffused with internet culture and reflections on the lives we live, now, largely online. What characterises Dan Hogan's poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane. To be non-binary, as these poems show is not to just be a secret third thing, it is to bring class consciousness to bear upon gender – Eda Gunaydin
About the Author
Dan Hogan (they/them) is the author of Secret Third Thing, which won the Mary Gilmore Award and the Five Islands Prize. Secret Third Thing was also named one of the ‘best 25 Australian books of 2023’ by The Guardian. Hogan’s poetry has won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Judith Wright Poetry Prize, XYZ Prize, and Val Vallis Award, among others. Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published widely, including in Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, The Guardian, and Jacobin. Hogan runs DIY publisher Subbed In and edits the working-class literary journal Industrial Estate. In 2024, Hogan received funding from Creative Australia to complete their first novel, tentatively titled The Phrog.
More of Hogan’s work can be found at: https://www.2dan2hogan.com/