**Highly Commended, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**

Naag Mountain is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia, which brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been lost in time or forgotten or hidden from view. It is a journey in which the living, the dead and the natural world communicate in music, language and dream.

Manisha Anjali's first collection is an intensely imagined recovery of a little-known cultural inheritance, in which historical figures, folk characters and mythical entities feature in a procession coloured by the metaphors of poetry and the surrealism of dreams. A community in northern Queensland, whose ancestors were indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, receive messages from their friends across the Tasman. A mysterious reel of film washes ashore, depicting harrowing violence on sugarcane plantations under the indenture system. The actors walk out of the film and into the world of the living. The community walk into the projection.