Australian Poetry has announced the three judges for the Anne Elder Award 2024 panel. They are Jeanine Leane, Theodore Ell, and Ella Skibeck-Porter. Theodore was the 2022 Anne Elder Award co-winner with Harry Reid (a judge last year) and Ella was Highly Commended in the 2023 Award.
2024 Anne Elder Award panel:
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and teacher from the Murrumbidgee River near Gundagai. Her poetry has won numerous awards and prizes, including the David Harold Tribe Prize 2023. Jeanine is widely published in the areas of Aboriginal literature, literary critique, and writing identity and difference. She is currently a First Nations Writer in Residence at the University of Melbourne where she previously taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature. Jeanine’s current poetry collection, Gawimarra: Gathering (University of Queensland Press), is short-listed for the VPLA 2024 Poetry Prize.
Theodore Ell is a writer and honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the 2022 Anne Elder Award. From 2018 to 2021 he lived in Lebanon, accompanying his wife on a diplomatic posting. Ell’s essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, about witnessing the 2019 Lebanese revolution and surviving the 2020 Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize, and his memoir Lebanon Days was published in 2024. Ell’s poetry, essays, translations and non-fiction have been published in Australia, Italy, the United Kingdom and Lebanon.
Ella Skilbeck-Porter is a poet living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut collection These are Different Waters (Vagabond 2023) was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest and the Mary Gilmore Award and was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies including Best of Australian Poems 2024, Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific, HEAT, Otoliths, Rabbit and Cordite Poetry Review.
