Arantza Garcia Ferrand at Adelaide's Dog-eared Readings. Jo CaseIn a world of doomscrolling and the prescriptive responses of AI, young people are increasingly turning to poetry: a form that is raw, honest and authentic. Poetry also invites the absurd and the experimental, making it a truly flexible way of facing both intimate and global complexity.Around 24% of children and young people (aged eight to 18) read poetry in their free time at least once a month, a 2025 United Kingdom survey found. And around 18% said they wrote poetry in their free time at least once a month. Compared to results a decade earlier, poetry reading had increased. The survey found that poetry was “a way to express and process their feelings and emotions”, a “quiet refuge”, a “tool for voice and agency”. There are no similar studies in Australia, but this passion for poetry among young people is evident here, too. It can be seen in their performances at poetry slams and pop-up events, readings at Sydney’s Sappho Books, Cafe and Bar and the memorably named Slugs in the North in Melbourne’s Coburg, and publications in chapbooks (a type of small, cheaply produced booklet), literary journals and on Instagram. Young poets breaking outK.J. Hayward was 16 when she performed at an open-mic night in Ballarat. Within a year, she had co-won the 2023 Australian Poetry Slam, on stage at the Sydney Opera House. (Solli Raphael was even younger when he won it in 2017, aged 12; he’s published three books since.) Spoken word poetry appealed to Hayward, she told Radio National’s breakfast show in 2024, because she felt she had “lost her voice sitting at a desk every day”. Hayward’s debut poetry collection, Puzzle, was published the next year, in 2024. It weaves stories of feminism, youth and her journey of the transition between “normal” school and home-school with the rap, rhythm and rhyme of slam. K.J. Hayward was a teenager when she co-won the 2023 Australian Poetry Slam – a year later, she published her own poetry book, Puzzle. Instagram The same year, she undertook a transnational collaboration with Aamani Kanda, the Young Poet Laureate for Coventry, UK, on a poem about body image, Scars. Their shared practice led her to realise that the two shared similar “worries, insecurities and concerns – even if we voice them differently”.Last year’s Australian Poetry Slam champion, 23-year-old Arantza Garcia Ferrand, will publish her poetic collage memoir, Cotton-Filled, about being a queer Peruvian woman in Australia, with Pink Shorts Press next year.Goorie and Koori poet and literary editor Evelyn Araluen was in her mid-twenties when she won the 2017 Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers aged 30 and under. Evelyn Araluen. UQP This was followed by the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2018, then the Stella Prize for her debut poetry collection, Dropbear in 2022. She would go on to win the 2026 Victorian Prize for Literature, worth A$100,000, for The Rot, a collection exploring the violence of settler colonialism and late-stage capitalism. Araluen told interviewer Annabella Luu that she also turned to external sources like Tumblr, blogging sites and Live Journal when writing The Rot, in order to better understand her teenage self. This kind of self-archival inquiry alongside a navigation of larger cultural histories is increasingly common among younger writers and artists.Narungga poet playwright Mali Harkin-Noack, aged 17, is on the editorial committee of Adelaide’s Splinter Journal, where her poetry was published in its First Nations issue last year. Her poetic essay grieving the effects of South Australia’s algal bloom was published in Cordite last year. DIY readings and publishingMelinda Bufton, CEO and publisher of Australian Poetry, points out that younger poets often hold public poetry reading nights (or reading series) that have “a real sense of immediacy” and a “positive ‘pop-up’ feel”. With these kinds of events, young poets might find a location through friends, arrange a few readers, and publicise quickly on socials, she says. Audiences may include non-poets, too – these events are social. A Slugs in the North reading night. Instagram In Melbourne right now, there’s Fitzroy’s Ad nauseam, Coburg’s Slugs in the North and the circulating Round Table Readings. Monthly reading series Bad Flaneur, founded in late 2024, is run from the upstairs band room of Bar Open, Fitzroy. Founded by American poet David Motamed, former host of Ratbag Poetics on Hobart’s Edge Radio, and Aotearoa New Zealand born poet Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, it crosses generations – and often has elements of irreverence. In Sydney, Sappho’s is a monthly reading series, named for the Glebe bookshop where it’s held. Having been hosted by poet Toby Fitch for a decade and now organised by Dave Drayton, Sarah Attfield and Anne Casey, it includes an open-mic section. Adelaide’s monthly series, No Wave, held at the inner-west Wheatsheaf Hotel, was started by poet Dominic Symes in 2018. A series of guest poets now curates the reading line-up. The Ern Malley reading series, in Adelaide’s Stepney, (which began in 2023) has featured emerging writers like 30-year-old Olivia de Zilva, whose debut poetry collection, Sick Note, is published next month. Canberra’s Poetry to Pay the Rent series doubles as community fundraising. Instagram And in Canberra, the Poetry to Pay the Rent reading series joins readings with community fundraising. The latest event, hosted at Fyshwick bookshop Book Runner, raised funds for the NSW/ACT Aboriginal Legal Service and Palestine Australia Relief and Action.Some reading series combine with small press journals, zines, and anthologies. In Melbourne, there’s Daniel Ward’s No Purchase. Sick Leave, an event series started in 2018, now focuses on publications too. Similarly, Subbed In started as a backyard reading series in Sydney in 2015, and has since developed into an extensive small press, featuring working-class, queer and First Nations writing.Opportunities for young and emerging poetsCordite Poetry Review is one of many journals and book publishers that offer regular opportunities for emerging writers – a category that spans all ages, but is often a good point of entry for young people. Tell Me Like You Mean It, the eighth of its annual chapbooks showcasing emerging writers, was published in March.Express Media is Australia’s dedicated literary organisation for people under 30. Its flagship journal, Voiceworks, is made by writers, editors and artists aged 25 and under. Bestselling poet and author Maxine Beneba Clarke is just one of the successful Australian writers with roots there. Claire Summerville/Voiceworks. Express Media's flagship journal, Voiceworks, is made by writers, editors and artists aged 25 and under. Red Room Poetry runs Poem Forest, a free national nature writing program for students, their teachers, and parents or guardians, in partnership with Woollongong City Council. A tree is planted for every poem received, linking the wellbeing potential of poetry with the healing of habitats.Red Room’s new Youth Poet Laureate program will support a Youth Poet Laureate (aged 18–25) from every Australian state and territory to join a curated mentorship program. This will complement Australia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, to be announced later this year. The Emerging Writers Festival, held annually in Melbourne, has long supported new and young writers. So has the National Young Writers Festival, based in Newcastle, an annual gathering of young writers next happening in 2027. Melbourne poet Addis Grande says poetry’s primary attraction is in what it can do as a form, rather than as personalised stories about “you or your friends or sex or beer”. Grande finds that fellow writers have an honesty: “There’s not room to hide bad art in poetry, and people will let you know. I could see that being appealing to young people. It is to me”. Ultimately, poetry’s capacity to test language and form is key to its resurgence in popularity. Its capaciousness makes poetry possible for young people (and, indeed, all of us) to navigate a world in polycrisis. It can provide a means of refusal, survival, wonder, or connection – and to imagine, variously, what might come next.Ann Vickery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.