Book Launch: The Hum Hearers by Shey Marque

"The powerfully evocative The Hum Hearers connects imagination, memory and embedded feeling. These are beautifully conceived, salutary and wonderfully transportative poems." Paul Hetherington

"Brilliantly observational and meditative, the poems in The Hum Hearers detonate like muffled explosions. Generational trauma is counterbalanced by hidden wells of resilience and subterranean solidarities. The poems, written in sprung prose, offer the counter-memories of women held together by the cycles of life that fall upon them with quiet devastation. The piquant aphorisms and subtle epiphanies in these poems rewrite the banalities of experience in a newly epic register." 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award judge

Shey Marque is a poet and former clinical haematology and research scientist from Boorloo. She holds a BAppSc(Hons) in Biomedical Science, PhD in Molecular Pathology, and MA in Writing. Currently she coordinates the Hospital Poets Program (Australia) and serves on the Board of Writing WA. Keeper of the Ritual (UWAP 2019), her debut collection, was shortlisted for the Noel Rowe Poetry Award. The Hum Hearers (UWAP 2025), shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award, is her second collection.

Her poetry has won numerous awards including Qld Poetry Festival Emerging Poet, the Blue Nib Chapbook Award, the Poetry d’Amour Prize, was twice the recipient of the KSP Poetry Prize, and shortlisted in many others including the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her individual poems have been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and online, nationally and internationally.

This free event includes readings, book sales and signings, and complimentary refreshments.