Blake Mackenzie, a 12-year-old from Newcastle, has won the top youth prize at the Australian Poetry Slam for his reflections on artificial intelligence. The winning piece, performed at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night, covered doomscrolling, loneliness and intellectual atrophy.
Read the full story:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/26/12-year-old-wins-australian-poetry-slam-chatgpt?CMP=gdnaus_yt
The year six student from Newcastle won over the 10 judges at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday night with smart and succinct lines, such as “You’re designed to addict us and never contradict us” and “Your friendship is endless so why do I feel friendless?”.
The judges, who were randomly selected from the audience, might have been even more impressed to hear Blake wrote the poem only the day before.
“I was making them as I went through [the competition],” he told Guardian Australia on Monday. “I just kept winning and it was all because I wrote a cool poem in class one day.”
The Australian Poetry Slam competition is now in its 22nd year. It ran 65 heats in 60 towns and cities across the country to find 16 finalists.
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