Esther Ottaway is an award-winning Australian poet. At this time, she is shortlisted among fifty poets for the world’s biggest poetry prize, the Montreal International Poetry Prize. 

Her poetry was selected to feature in the noted anthology Thirty Australian Poets, published by University of Queensland Press. She has been published widely over twenty years in leading newspapers including The Australian and The Canberra Times, top literary journals including Meanjin and Heat, and many anthologies.

Works from her critically acclaimed first book, Blood Universe: poems on pregnancy have been widely anthologised in national publications on motherhood, and have been recognised as an important exploration of women’s experience. 

Poems from this book are listed as further reading in 60 Classic Australian Poems, and were featured on Radio National’s Poetica and at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Queensland Writers’ Festival, the Australian Poetry Festival, and the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. They were also set to music for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. 
 

Esther has written commissioned performance poetry works for the stage for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival and Tasmania’s Festival of Voices. She has also written commissions for, and been Writer in Residence at, Kingston and Ogilvie High Schools for the national poetry body Red Room Poetry.

She has served as a one-on-one poetry mentor through the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre. She has worked collaboratively with artists in other art forms, including fibre and visual artists.
 
Esther has won a residential Writers’ Fellowship at Varuna, the Writers’ House, NSW, and has been awarded grants for arts practise from the Sidney Myer Foundation, Arts Tasmania and Regional Arts Tasmania. 

As well as the world shortlisting in the Montreal Prize, her prizes include the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, First Prize in the Tasmanian Literary Awards, and First Prize in The Write Stuff competition, judged by renowned Australian poet Stephen Edgar. 

She was the only poet chosen for inclusion in the showcase book Island Story: Tasmania in object and text, edited by Danielle Wood and Ralph Crane. 

Her new poetry collection, Intimate, low-voiced, delicate things, is to be published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. It explores family and its origins, parenthood, love and the loss of love. 

She lives in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Hear a review of Esther's work by poet Geoff Page.