New HSC English Texts 2027–2030: What You Need to Know About the Prescribed Texts

All prescribed texts, including those selected for study across the new HSC English syllabuses, possess the potential to provide students with valuable lessons about the nature of human experience and the moral and social forces that shape the world in which they live. In 2024, NESA released revised English Advanced and English Standard syllabuses alongside a new set of prescribed texts to be examined from 2027, with the prescription extended to run through to 2030. The texts selected across both courses reflect a sustained commitment to the re-representation of universal human experiences — identity, belonging, grief, language, power, and the relationship between the individual and the broader social and cultural world. The more directly a prescribed text engages with these universal concerns, the greater its didactic potential for the reader, and it is through this lens that the following guide approaches the 2027 prescriptions.

This post offers a first look at what each text is about, what makes it worth studying, and why it may have been chosen. The information here draws on literary reviews, publisher notes, and critical commentary available online and is intended as a starting point rather than a definitive account.

English Advanced and Standard: Texts and Human Experiences

This is the shared module between Advanced and Standard. Both courses study texts in this module, though the analytical demands differ between them.

Prose Fiction

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

A slim, spare novella from a Melbourne writer. The surface narrative is deliberately simple — a young woman travels to Japan with her mother, visiting galleries, eating in cafés, walking through autumn streets — but beneath that restraint, the novella explores something considerably more difficult to articulate.

The relationship between the narrator and her mother is careful, almost formal, and the novella re-represents the complexity of that relationship through what remains unsaid as much as through what is spoken
The narrative moves between the present trip and fragments of the narrator’s memory, raising questions about how clearly we are ever able to understand those closest to us
Au’s prose style is notably restrained. The space between sentences is as significant as the sentences themselves, and it is through this formal economy that the novella achieves its most affecting moral and emotional effects
Themes of diaspora run through the book with quiet insistence. The mother grew up in Hong Kong before immigrating; the narrator is second-generation Australian. The Japan trip functions, among other things, as a search for neutral cultural ground between two women who do not quite share a world

It is a gentle but morally unsettling book, one that rewards readers who are attentive to what is withheld as much as what is offered.

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

Malouf’s 1978 novel is a fictional meditation on the Roman poet Ovid, exiled by Emperor Augustus to a remote village on the edge of the empire. It is one of the foundational texts of Australian literature and its inclusion on the HSC prescription is well justified.

Ovid, a poet of extraordinary sophistication and cultural refinement, finds himself in a place with no Latin, no writing, and no culture he recognises. The novel re-represents the universal experience of displacement by placing it in an extreme and philosophically productive form
The novel becomes, in turn, an exploration of language itself: what happens to a person who defines themselves entirely through words when access to words is taken away?
A feral child who lives in the wild becomes central to the second half of the novel. The relationship between Ovid and the Child raises fundamental questions about civilisation, nature, and what it means to be human in the most essential sense
Themes include exile, transformation (Ovid’s own Metamorphoses echo throughout the novel with deliberate irony), the limits of language, and the connection between selfhood and place

Henry Lawson, The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories

The prescribed stories are: ‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, ‘Shooting the Moon’, ‘Our Pipes’, ‘The Loaded Dog’. Lawson is one of the foundational voices of Australian literary culture, and these stories have been studied across generations for the moral and social commentary they offer about the realities of Australian bush life.

‘The Drover’s Wife’ is his most celebrated story: a woman alone on a remote property deals with a snake beneath the floorboards while her husband is away droving. It is deceptively simple in form and has generated significant critical and creative responses
‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ is a darkly comic account of a funeral for a stranger in outback New South Wales, and its didactic force derives from the way it uses understatement to comment on community, class, and the indifference of the social world
‘The Loaded Dog’ is lighter in register: a story of larrikin bushmen and a dog who does not understand the danger of what he carries
Themes across the collection include mateship, class, hardship, isolation, the bush as both threatening and identity-forming, and an emotional restraint that consistently communicates more through what it withholds than what it states directly

Poetry

Rosemary Dobson, Selected Poems

The prescribed poems are: ‘Young Girl at a Window’, ‘Summer’s End’, ‘Cock Crow’, ‘A Fine Thing’, ‘Child of Our Time’, ‘Piltdown Man’, ‘Every Man His Own Sculptor’. Dobson (1920–2012) was one of Australia’s most respected poets and her work is precise, classical in structure, and deeply attentive to the relationship between art, memory, and the passage of time.

Many of her poems engage directly with visual art, particularly painting, as a way of thinking about perception, preservation, and the limits of what any representation can capture
She is interested in what art is able to preserve and what it cannot: what gets frozen in form and what continues to change beyond it
‘Child of Our Time’ confronts the violence of the twentieth century with controlled grief, demonstrating the capacity of formal restraint to carry significant moral weight
Her style is formal without being rigid, and students who find poetry difficult often respond productively to Dobson because her poems are structurally clear and her images are concrete

Gwen Harwood, Selected Poems

The prescribed poems are: ‘The Glass Jar’, ‘The Violets’, ‘At Mornington’, ‘Father and Child, I and II’, ‘A Valediction’, ‘Beyond Metaphor’, ‘The Sharpness of Death’. Harwood is one of Australia’s finest poets, and these poems represent some of her most morally and emotionally instructive work.

‘Father and Child’ is a two-part poem about a daughter’s relationship with her father across time. It moves from a childhood act of violence against a bird to the father’s death, and it is through this progression that Harwood re-represents the universal experience of grief with devastating precision
‘The Violets’ deals with childhood memory and the way the past reaches into the present without warning, raising questions about the relationship between the senses and the experience of time
‘At Mornington’ explores swimming and mortality and the way the body carries experience across the full arc of a life
Harwood’s central concerns include time, mortality, music, parenthood, the intellectual life of women, and the experience of grief. She writes with great emotional intelligence and formal control, and her work consistently rewards close analytical attention

Samuel Wagan Watson, Love Poems and Death Threats

The prescribed poems are: ‘The Remedy of Butterflies’, ‘Finn’, ‘Let’s Talk!’, ‘El Diablo Highway’, ‘Blacktracker… Blackwriter… Blacksubject’, ‘End of Days’, ‘Addendum’. Watson is a Birri Gubba and Mununjali poet from Queensland and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Australian poetry. His inclusion on the new prescription is a significant and welcome addition.

The collection re-represents the songlines of an Australia marked by invasion and injustice, but it is also funny, urban, and alive with pop culture references and vernacular energy that give the political commentary a particular kind of force
The love poems are raw and honest. The political poems are precise and uncompromising. The two registers exist together in a way that is itself a form of moral commentary
Watson is deeply interested in the relationship between Indigenous experience and place, and between personal grief and collective history, and he explores this relationship through a style that mixes the formal and the colloquial, the lyrical and the satirical, the tender and the confrontational
Students who find canonical poetry difficult often connect strongly with Watson’s voice precisely because it does not perform the distance that canonical poetry sometimes requires

Drama, Film and Nonfiction

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (nonfiction)

Flanagan is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, and Question 7 (2023) is a work of literary nonfiction that functions as part memoir and part meditation on history, science, and the randomness of existence.

The title references a Gestapo interrogation form on which Question 7 asks for the subject’s race. In doing so, the book examines how history turns on contingencies and how individual lives are shaped by forces entirely beyond personal control
Flanagan reflects on his father’s survival as a prisoner of war, his own childhood in Tasmania, and the way literature and writing offer a means of making meaning from the chaos of historical experience
Themes include fate, storytelling, the relationship between history and individual life, and the question of what writing itself is for

Michael Gow, Away (drama)

Away (1986) is one of the most studied plays in the history of Australian drama and its inclusion here reflects the ongoing didactic value of its moral and emotional concerns.

Three families go on holiday in the summer of 1967 and 1968, a period of significant social and cultural change in Australia
One of the characters, Tom, is terminally ill. His situation shapes the emotional landscape of the play without defining it, and it is through this restraint that Gow is able to explore mortality without reducing the play to a single theme
The play draws on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear in ways that reward careful analytical attention
Themes include mortality, healing, class tension, the transformative power of landscape, and the possibility of reconciliation within families

Rachel Perkins, One Night the Moon (film)

A 2001 Australian musical film set in outback New South Wales in the 1930s and based loosely on real events.

A young girl wanders into the bush and goes missing. Her father’s refusal to allow an Aboriginal tracker to assist, as a result of his racial prejudice, produces tragic consequences that the film re-represents through spare, haunting music rather than conventional dramatic narrative
Themes include racism, grief, the land, and the moral cost of refusing to acknowledge Indigenous knowledge and the people who hold it

English Standard: Language, Identity and Culture

This module is specific to English Standard and its central didactic concern is the relationship between language, selfhood, and the cultural forces that shape both.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake re-represents the experience of identity across generations of an Indian American family, exploring the tension between inherited cultural memory and the pressures of assimilation. Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air is a powerful Australian novel about a young Aboriginal woman’s search for identity and country, and it is one of the most affecting texts on the Standard prescription. Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance is a landmark debut collection exploring Deaf identity, mixed-race identity, and the complex relationship with language when language itself is partly inaccessible — a re-representation of human experience that speaks directly to the concerns of this module. Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill’s Contemporary Asian Australian Poets is an anthology that represents a range of voices writing from and about Asian Australian experience, offering students access to perspectives that have been historically underrepresented in the canon.

Film in this module includes Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl (2022), a tender Irish film about a quiet child sent to stay with relatives for the summer who finds, possibly for the first time, that she is genuinely seen and valued; and drama includes Alana Valentine’s Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah, which centres on a conversation between two Muslim Australian women about the decision to wear the hijab, and in doing so re-represents the relationship between cultural identity and personal agency with great intelligence and care.

English Standard: Close Study of Literature

MT Anderson’s Feed (2002) is a prescient dystopian novel set in a future where the internet is directly connected to the human brain. It is sharp, satirical, and uncomfortably relevant to contemporary discussions of social media, corporate power, and the erosion of critical thought, and its didactic potential for students living through these very conditions is considerable.

Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost (2022) is a quiet, lyrical Australian novel set across decades in a Tasmanian river valley. A young man spends a summer hunting rabbits while his brothers are at war; the novel then follows him across his life, exploring masculinity, grief, family, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world with formal economy and great emotional intelligence.

Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, including ‘War Photographer’, ‘Stealing’, ‘Little Red Cap’, and ‘Mrs Midas’, is known for its dramatic monologues and its commitment to giving voice to figures on the margins or in the shadows of familiar stories, and it is through this re-representation of overlooked perspectives that Duffy achieves her most significant didactic effects. Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s My People brings one of Australia’s first published Aboriginal poets into the close study framework, with poems that range from political protest to celebration of culture and country and that demonstrate, across their full range, the moral and creative force of the Indigenous literary tradition.

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy of wit, miscommunication, and the performance of gender, and its inclusion offers students the opportunity to engage with one of the most formally accomplished treatments of social identity in the English literary canon. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) is a beautifully constructed science fiction film about language, time, and the relationship between how we speak and how we experience the world, and it is an inspired and intellectually serious choice for close study.

English Advanced: Textual Conversations

This module pairs texts across time and form to explore how texts speak to and transform each other, and it is through the relationship between the paired texts that the module’s most significant didactic work is done.

Some of the most instructive pairings include:

Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (uncompromising short fiction from 1902 about the brutal realities of rural life for women) paired with Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother (poetry rooted in Stolen Generations trauma, country, and Wiradjuri identity). The pairing re-represents the experience of land, women, and survival across two very different historical and cultural moments, producing a dialogue that is confronting and analytically rich
William Blake’s poetry paired with Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Tokarczuk’s novel takes its title from a Blake line and builds a philosophical murder mystery in rural Poland around a narrator obsessed with Blake and animal rights. The pairing is one of the most intellectually unusual on the list and rewards students who are prepared to take it seriously
Keats’s odes paired with Jane Campion’s Bright Star, a film about Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne that attends closely to the texture and emotional world of the poetry
Shakespeare’s Hamlet paired with Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems. The pairing works on both thematic and formal levels, with death, consciousness, and the interior life as the central connective concerns
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar paired with Machiavelli’s The Prince, a pairing that generates productive and sustained discussion of power, political manipulation, and the moral obligations of those who govern
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway paired with Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, one of the most explicitly connected pairings on the list, in which the film directly engages with Woolf’s novel and her life as both subject and formal model

English Advanced: Critical Study of Literature

Texts here include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (a beautifully written novel about memory, wartime London, and the moral complexity of secrets parents keep from their children), and Shakespeare’s Othello and King Henry IV, Part 1.

For poetry, Louise Glück’s selected poems — including ‘The Wild Iris’, ‘Nostos’, and ‘Vita Nova’ — bring a Nobel Prize-winning American poet to the HSC prescription for the first time. Glück’s work is spare, philosophically serious, and deeply interested in grief, transformation, and the relationship between the human and the natural world. ‘The Wild Iris’ in particular is extraordinary: poems spoken by flowers, by a gardener, and by God, meditating on consciousness and rebirth in a way that makes its inclusion in Critical Study feel both appropriate and overdue.

W.B. Yeats needs no introduction. The selected poems cover the full arc of his career — from the romanticism of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ to the apocalyptic intensity of ‘The Second Coming’ and the late beauty of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ — and they represent some of the most rewarding close analytical work available anywhere on the Advanced prescription.

The Prescription as a Whole

This is a genuinely strong set of texts, and a number of qualities of the list as a whole are worth noting:

There is a sustained and serious commitment to Indigenous Australian voices across both courses and multiple modules: Watson, Cobby Eckermann, Noonuccal, Winch, One Night the Moon, and Swallow the Air together represent a significant expansion of the Indigenous literary presence on the HSC
Several texts engage directly with language as their central moral and thematic concern — Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, Antrobus’s The Perseverance, Anderson’s Feed, and Villeneuve’s Arrival — and this convergence across different modules and courses is not likely a coincidence
The pairing of Blake with Tokarczuk is the most unexpected choice on the list and one of the most intellectually promising for students willing to engage with it on its own terms
Glück’s inclusion in Critical Study reflects a serious engagement with contemporary international poetry and brings a distinctly modern moral and philosophical sensibility to the Advanced course
Students in Standard have access to some of the strongest texts on the list. Swallow the Air, Feed, Limberlost, and Antrobus’s collection in particular are works that reward rereading and close analytical attention in equal measure

The full prescriptions document is available on the NESA website for teachers and students who want the complete detail on text selections and module requirements.

Working through any of these texts and want help with essay structure, close reading, or exam preparation? Book a session with Boldtutor for one-on-one tutoring in person or online.