To celebrate National Poetry Month, this episode of NGA Art Talks explores the intersection of text, poetry and art.

In 2024 the National Gallery, together with Red Room poetry, commissioned Vietnamese Australian writer and poet Nam Le and Palawa playwright Dylan Van Den Berg to respond to a work of art from the national collection.

Nam Le’s debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was published in March 2024 in Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom, and won Book of the Year at the 2025 New South Wales Literary Awards.

Le’s work has been translated into over fourteen languages and has received major awards in America, Europe and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship. Le’s work has appeared in modern classics series and is widely anthologized and taught.

Le chose Sidney Nolan’s painting Quilting the armour, one of a series on the theme of the bushranger Ned Kelly. In this episode, recorded in front of a live audience as part of the Gallery’s Friday Art Talks program, Le reads his ekphrastic poem and shares insights into the writing process.

Artworks discussed:

Sidney Nolan - Quilting the armour

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