Congratulations to Toby Davidson, for Special Commendation in the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, run by Melbourne Uni. The judges commented:
Toby Davidson’s extraordinary long poem ‘Indian Pacific’ takes us on an Australian Odyssey across the land, capacious, captivating, attentive simultaneously to the revelatory details of little events and abstract structures, to encounters with a diversity of people and places as well as with the concepts and forces at play in the country today. Davidson presents an impressive range of registers without ever lapsing into pastiche, controlled by an expansive vision. The poem’s varied rhythms and manifold vernaculars give the impression of being taken on a ride – through the bush, through formal ingenuity, through epic narrative, and through time.