Melinda Smith won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for her fourth book of poems, Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call (Pitt St Poetry, 2013). Her work has been widely anthologised both inside and outside Australia and has been translated into Indonesian, Chinese, Burmese and Italian. She is based in the ACT and is currently poetry editor of The Canberra Times. Her fifth collection, Goodbye, Cruel, is out in April 2017, also from Pitt St Poetry.

Photograph by Marina Mcdonald