MOYA PACEY
Moya Pacey was born and grew up in Middlesbrough in the north of England. She came to Canberra in 1978 when it was a country town masquerading as a city and taught English there until she retired.
Her poetry has featured on buses and radio, in galleries and has appeared in print and online journals and anthologies here and overseas and has won prizes. In 2011 she won the Elizabeth Bishop ‘Short Story Competition’ and travelled to Great Village Nova Scotia Canada to receive her prize and stayed at the Elizabeth Bishop House.
Moya Pacey’s third collection, Doggerland (Recent Work Press 2020) was highly commended in 2021 ACT Book of the Year Awards.
Her previous two poetry collections: Black Tulips ( RWP 2017) and The Wardrobe ( Ginninderra Press 2010) were shortlisted for the ACT Writers Centre Award. One Last Border: Refugee Poems (Ginninderra Press 2015) was co-written with Hazel Hall and Sandra Renew.
She is a founding editor of the women’s on-line journal, Not Very Quiet notveryquiet.com. and was awarded a Canberra Critics’ Circle Award in 2019 for her influential work in exposing women’s poetry to view via the journal.
In October 2018, she was the Poet in Residence at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Listen to Moya read and talk about her poetry https://artsound.fm/poetry-on-the-radio/.
ROSA O’KANE
Rosa O’Kane is an emerging poet who was born and grew up in Northern Ireland and has lived and worked in Canberra for 30 years. Rosa began writing poetry about ten years ago and was encouraged by her poem Hydrography of The Heart being a Highly Commended entry in the Hippocrates Poetry Prize 2014. In 2022 she was awarded the June Shenfield National Poetry Award for an emerging writer for her work titled If I Put It In A Poem In June 2024 Rosa won the Wollongong Art Gallery poetry prize run by the South Coast Writers Centre for her poem On Slack Water
PENELOPE COTTIER
Penelope Cottier is a poet who occasionally writes prose. Born in England, she has spent nearly her entire life in Australia, give or take six months. Her professional background is diverse, including roles as a lawyer, university tutor, union organiser, and tea lady. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University, where she focused on animals in the works of Charles Dickens, as well as a law degree from The University of Melbourne.
Cottier gives frequent readings of her work in Canberra and elsewhere, and often dabbles in the foul pit of literary competitions, sometimes with success. She has judged poetry competitions, too, which probably puts her on a particularly interesting level of Dante’s Inferno. Penelope has edited poetry for The Canberra Times, a newspaper, for two years. Recently hernovella The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, co-written by NG Hartland, won the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publication Prize.