"Prize-Giving" is a 1959 poem by Australian author Gwen Harwood.^[1]

It was first published in Meanjin, vol. 18 no. 4 December 1959, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's collections and other poetry anthologies.^[1]

The poem forms part of the author's "Professor Eisenbart" series of poems. This professor "has been interpreted as a 'mask' though which the poet expresses certain anarchic or anti-Establishment views and as a persona which allows her to reflect ironically on the human condition."^[2]

The poem is set at a prize-giving ceremony at a prestigious girls' school. A number of dignitaries have been invited to present the awards and make speeches; Professor Eisenbart among them.

In his book Reading Australian Poetry Andrew Taylor noted that this poem, like others in the Eisenbart sequence, is largely, a poem of "reversal". Here the "'honoured guest' who has come 'to lend distinction' to a school prizegiving recognizes himself in the poem's final stanza as 'a sage fool'. Age, scholarly excellence, science, maleness — all qualities in Eisenbart's world and, it appears, in the girls' school too, are held to be preeminient – are subverted by youth, intuitive brilliance, art, that is, music, femaleness."^[3]

After the poem's initial publication in Meanjin^[1] it was reprinted as follows:

• Verse in Australia Vol 3, edited by Robert Clark, Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris, 1960^[1]
• Australian Poetry 1960 edited by A. D. Hope, Angus and Robertson, 1960^[4]
• Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1963^[5]
• Modern Australian Verse edited by Douglas Stewart, Angus and Robertson, 1964^[6]
• Australian Writing Today edited by Charles Higham, Penguin, 1968^[7]
• A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1968^[8]
• Australian Voices : A Collection of Poetry and Pictures edited by Edward Kynaston, Penguin, 1974^[9]
• Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 1975^[10]
• The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981^[11]
• The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991^[12]
• The Sting in the Wattle : Australian Satirical Verse edited by Philip Neilsen, University of Queensland Press, 1993^[13]
• Bridgings : Readings in Australian Women's Poetry edited by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden, Oxford University Press, 1996^[14]
• 50 Years of Queensland Poetry : 1940s to 1990s edited by Philip Neilsen and Helen Horton, Central Queensland University Press, 1998^[15]
• Selected Poems : A New Edition by Gwen Harwood, Angus and Robertson, 2001^[16]
• Mappings of the Plane : New Selected Poems by Gwen Harwood, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Fyfield Books, 2009^[17]
• The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood, Black Inc., 2014^[18]

• You can read the full text of the poem in Bridgings : Readings in Australian Women's Poetry edited by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden, Oxford University Press, 1996, on the Internet Archive^[19]

• 1959 in Australian literature