Two Hundred Million Musketeers

Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026, Poetry

Two Hundred Million Musketeers, Ender Bakan's debut poetry collection, depicts the intensity of life as a parent of young children. It maps the shifting trains of thought which accompany the experience of being a new parent, when one's attention is drawn in many different directions—between child-rearing and housekeeping, domestic crises, the need to earn a living, and the responsibilities you have to the past as well as to the future, to your own parents and grandparents, as well as to your children. Work, friendships, social life, and creative practice are all altered.

The poet reflects on his own childhood and his grandparents' exile from their homeland in Turkey, to which he returns several times with his own young family. But there is also an increased awareness of the future—not only the world his children will grow up in, but the kind of world that is being built right now, in homes, workplaces, and in social and political allegiances.

Perhaps most tellingly, since Ender Bakan is a poet, he is subsumed in the flood of language, as it emerges from the mouths of his youngsters and from his own mouth as he talks to them. Words, sounds, and the effects of language come to the fore. The imagination of children lends its own wonder and surrealism to that of the poet. His writing is direct, playful, absurd, staunch, and political. In these respects, Bakan follows in the footsteps of the previous generation of Australia's poets of migrant background, all of them masters of language—Pi.O., Chris Mann, Antigone Kefala, and above all, the late Ania Walwicz, his close friend and mentor.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a compelling debut that weaves the idiosyncrasies of the world into its pages. Bakan's poetics are lively and utterly ungovernable in his refusal to bend to the idea of what a poetry collection should be. His spirited stream-of-consciousness invites the reader into the family of this collection by drawing from the imaginative language of children, the peculiarities of waged labour, and the return to his ancestral home of Turkey. The lived world, with its clamour and complexity, spills out of the book in unexpected ways.

VPLA judges' report