Title: latecomers
Author: Jaya Savige
Publisher: UQP
Year: 2005
Pages: 80
ISBN: 0702235199

Awards:
2006 Kenneth Slessor Prize
2006 Mary Gilmore Prize (Highly Commended)
2006 Judith Wright Calanthe Award (Shortlisted)
2004 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize
2003 Val Vallis Award for Poetry


The poems in latecomers go beyond what we take for granted these days in a first collection: refinement of language and cadence, allusiveness, wit. Moving easily through abstract wonders and the streets of the inner city, they return for nourishment to family and "the Island" - Bribie, its fishing-life and beaches - as a test always of what is native and endures.

- David Malouf

Jaya Savige is one of the most exciting young poets of the last few years. This first book is a big event, something new in the current climate of self-chekcked carefulness; as I read these poems I sense change emerging.

- Robert Adamson

Savige's voice is immediate, his eye, heart and mind are intelligent and sensitive. He reminds us of our lyrical traditions but obliterates their conservative inheritances, making total sense of the now.

- Peter Minter

The Sydney Morning Herald on the 2006 NSW Premier's Literary Awards dinner:

"There was a buzz about that evening's unexpected highlights:

1. Tim Flannery's six-word speech when The Weather Makers was named Book of the Year: "Go and buy a solar panel."

2. The young poetry prize-winner Jaya Savige's thrilling recital of Kenneth Slessor's poem South Country. For a moment art obliterated politics and commerce.

3. Rosemary Dobson - a tiny figure with a walking stick - reciting her own poem Museum 2.

4. And even the gracious speech by the Premier, Morris Iemma, who admitted his only leisure reading was bedtime stories to his children but stressed the importance of a love of reading and writing for all children. OK, someone probably fed him the words, but the children's authors loved him."

- Susan Wyndham, Sydney Morning Herald May 25, 2006

'the bashful whale of may exhales'...South Head Picnic with Pete n Kate, during Sydney Writers Festival week 2006.




After Pete Minter's launch of 'blue grass' (Salt 2006)




Adelaide Writers' Week 2006 - In the Gardens...