Jill Chan's third book, These Hands Are Not Ours, has just won the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize.

Jill Chan's These Hands Are Not Ours, her third book of poetry, explores the deep and sometimes uncanny relationships between our human experiences and our wider, more tenuous though, at times, no less ambiguous experiences of the divine. These poems are written in an almost subliminal language filled with beautiful tension and silent immensity.

Perhaps we are never created

until we are brave enough

to be made.

Until these hands

are not ours

but the sky’s,

we claim too much

of the night,

the love,

its making.

(excerpt from 'Claim')

Jill Chan migrated to New Zealand in 1994. Her poems have appeared in Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Trout, Takahe, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, MiPOesias, Tears in the Fence, foam:e, and New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Her two previous collections, The Smell of Oranges, and Becoming Someone Who Isn't, were published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop.

She is the co-editor of Best New Poems Online; and editor of Poetry Sz: demystifying mental illness, and Numinous: Spiritual Poetry.

Official website: http://www.jillchan.net