Onyx B Carmine

Onyx B. Carmine is the winner of the 2017 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award. Working under their birth name of Sarah-Jane Norman, Onyx has been hailed as one of the most challenging and rigorous Australian experimental artists of their generation. Over the course of their 13 year solo career, Onyx has created a diverse body of interdisciplinary work spanning durational, intimate and body-based performance, dance, installation, sculpture, text, sound and moving image. Their work has been presented and supported by Tate Modern, Venice International Performance Art Week, Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, and Melbourne Festival to name a few. Onyx’s poetry, prose and ficto-critical work has seen publication in Meanjin, Overland, The Cultural Studies Review of Australia, Stylus and Realtime among others. They received high commendation in both the 2008 and 2009 Overland/Judith Wright Prize for Poetry and the 2007 DJ (Dinny) O’Hearn Award, and were long-listed for the 2017 Elizabeth Jolley Prize for Short Story. They have also co-edited publications on Indigenous film and are the co-editor and lead writer on a forthcoming publication on Indigenous Australian experimental art practice. Written between 2004 and 2009, Permafrost is their first full length work of fiction. Born on Gadigal land of Wiradjuri and Anglo-Celtic ancestry, Onyx has been based in Berlin since 2009. They currently divide their time between Berlin and unceded Wurundjeri land.