Miscellany | Writers | Australia

Writers SA—Members

Richard James Allen | Stuart Barnes | Andrew Burke | Anne Elvey | Clementine Ford | Zenobia Frost | Elanna Herbert | Andy Jackson | Helga Jermy | Jeanine Leane | Sharyn Munro | Libby Sommer | Lucy Van | Hazel Smith | Ben Walter | Jane Williams | Liz Winfield | Grace Yee |

Richard James Allen (He/Him), is an Australian poet, born in Kempsey, New South Wales, on the unceded lands of the Dunghutti People. He lives on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, in Redfern, a centre of Indigenous migration and a hub of Aboriginal activism for many years.

Stuart Barnes was born in Tasmania, educated at Monash University, Victoria and lives in Queensland, Australia. His first book, Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 FAW Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 ASAL Mary Gilmore Award. His second book, Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023), won the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry. Stuart, Nigel Featherstone, Melinda Smith and CJ Bowerbird are Hell Herons, a spoken-work/music collective whose first record is due in 2024.

Andrew Burke (born 1944 in Melbourne, Victoria, died 23 May 2023 in Perth) was a contemporary Australian poet. Early in his working life, Burke pursued a career in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. In the 1970s he had received prizes: the Thomas Wardle poetry prize of 1973, and in 1977 the Tom Collins poetry prize. He switched to academia as a literature and creative writing lecturer in middle age. He received an MA in writing from Edith Cowan University in 2002, and a PhD in writing in 2006. He lectured in Australia and China, and read his poetry to audiences of all ages in the United Kingdom, Singapore, China, and throughout Australia. His poetry has been included in Western Australian and Australian anthologies. (source | wikiwand)

Anne Elvey is of Irish, Scottish and English settler descent, a poet, editor and researcher with interests in ecological poetics, ecological feminist hermeneutics, ecological criticism, the material turn, counter-colonial and decolonising ecological ethics, creative research practices, poetry and biblical literature. Her poetry publications include, Leaf (Liquid Amber Press 2022), shortlisted for the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for the best work of creative writing with an ecological theme, Obligations of Voice (Recent Work Press 2021), On arrivals of breath (Poetica Christi 2019), White on White (Cordite Books 2018), and Kin (FIP 2014), shortlisted in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2015. In 2017-2018 she edited hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani. Anne was the inaugural managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics from 2013 to 2020.

Clementine Ford is the author of four books of non-fiction: (2016) Fight Like a Girl, (2018) Boys Will Be Boys. (2021) How We Love: Notes on a Life, and (2023), I Don't.

Zenobia Frost is a writer and editor based in Brisbane, Australia. Her work can be found in Cordite, Scum, Overland, Meanjin and Contemporary Feminist Poetry. She won the 2018 Val Vallis Award for her poem, ‘Reality On-Demand‘. Zenobia’s latest poetry collection, After the Demolition (Cordite Books) won the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Read more about it in LA Review of Books. Through 2020–21, Zenobia produced Panacea Poets, Pick-n-Mix Poetry Zoom Workshops and the Arts Queensland Poets in (Digital) Residence Program for Queensland Poetry.

Over half the poems in Elanna Herbert's debut poetry collection sifting fire writing coast (Walleah Press, 2023) have been previously published in literary journals, anthologies, or recognised in Australian literary awards. Divided into three sections 'fire', 'sifting' and 'coast', the collection achieves a vibrant, accessible work of quality which engages current issues related to our physical and social environment. Using a variety of forms: from list poems, prose, stanzas, to non standard typography, she deftly explores, sifts and works on issues of place and being, and our shaky connections to the land as settlers on this arid country. Elanna is also the author of Frieda & the Cops: & other Laminex table stories (Ginninderra Press, 2005), and Neohistorical Fiction and Hannah’s Place: A Creative Response to Colonial Representation (VDM Verlag, 2008).

Andy Jackson is a poet preoccupied with difference, embodiment and solidarity. He has featured at literary events and arts festivals across Australia, in Ireland, India and the USA. His first published book of poems, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and his fourth collection, Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold, which consists of portrait poems of other people with Marfan Syndrome, was shortlisted for the 2020 John Bray Poetry Award. Andy’s most recent poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, as well as being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. These autobiographical and biographical poems speak with the voices of the disabled and disfigured, in myth, art, history and the present moment. They’re visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen. Andy works part-time as a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at The University of Melbourne.

Helga Jermy is an English/Estonian poet, now living on Tasmania’s northwest coast. Her poems, which mainly focus on identity, place and occasional experimental form, have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rabbit, Australian Poetry anthologies and journals, Cordite Poetry Review, Island and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and UK Bridport Prize for poetry and flash fiction, plus longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, teacher and academic from southwest New South Wales. After a longer teaching career, she completed a doctorate in Australian literature and Aboriginal representation and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887–1961 (Presspress, 2010) won the 2010 Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry and her first novel, Purple Threads (UQP), won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Indigenous writer in 2010. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, Journal for the Association of Australian Literary Studies, Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland, Best Australian Poems, Lifted Brow, Southerly and Australian Book Review. In September 2023, Jeanine was appointed poetry editor of Meanjin. In October 2023, Jeanine won the Sydney University’s David Harold Tribe Poetry Award for an original unpublished poem on any theme, up to 100 lines in length. Jeanine’s poem 'Water under the bridge' was selected from a shortlist of seven poems, out of a record 522 total submissions.

Sharyn Munro's short stories have won many prizes, including The Alan Marshall Award; she wrote regularly for The Owner Builder Magazine, and her essays have been published in the Griffith Review and Famous Reporter. The very different Rich Land, Wasteland — how coal is killing Australia (Pan Macmillan/Exisle 2012) arose from her empathy with the people and places of the nearby Hunter Valley being devastated from runaway opencut coalmining. The aim of this self-designated ‘commonsense activist’ was to shock Australians into action, with the truth about coal and CSG. People have compared her book to Silent Spring in its passion, its exposure of issues and the possibility it may lead to a change in the way we treat our world.

Libby Sommer's poems and short stories are published regularly in literary journals and newspapers including Quadrant, Overland and The Canberra Times. Her first poetry collection, The Cellist, a Bellydancer & Other Distractions was published in 2022. Her second collection, Flat White, One Sugar was released early in March 2024 by Ginninderra Press.

Hazel Smith is active in the areas of poetry, performance and new media. Her work has appeared in numerous international literary magazines and in literary, musical and multimedia anthologies. She has published five volumes of poetry: Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90, Butterfly Books, 1991; Keys Round her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts, Soma, 2000; The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, 2008 (accompanied by a CD-Rom of new media and performance works with Roger Dean); Word Migrants, Giramondo Publishing, 2016,; and ecliptical, Spineless Wonders, 2022. An electronic chapbook of poems, Learning to be Human, was published by SOd Press in 2020.

Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. Her collection, The Open (Cordite 2021), was longlisted for the Stella Prize, shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award, and highly commended in the Anne Elder Award. She is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Melbourne.

Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer of fiction, essays, poetry and experimental nature writing. In recent years, he's been one of the nation’s most widely published writers of short stories. His debut short fiction collection, What Fear Was, is available in print or as an ebook. He's a past fiction editor at Island Magazine, and also curated Island’s Australian Nature Writing project, and was founding editor of the magazine’s online journal. Ben is the author of two previous short books, Below Tree Level and Conglomerate. Conglomerate was published as part of the Lost Rocks series, and shortlisted in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. He has curated two anthologies of Tasmanian fiction, I Sleep in Haysheds and Corners and Seven Stories, and was assistant editor of The Abels V.1, a mountain climbing guide. Together with Jane Rawson, he edited Breathing Space, a collection of essays, stories and poems reflecting on Tasmanian relationships with nature.

Jane Williams was born in England in 1964 and lives in lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia with her partner Ralph Wessman. Since the early 1990s her poems have been published in most major Australian literary journals and newspapers, in periodicals and online in countries including Ireland, USA, Canada, England, Japan, Sweden and India.

Liz Winfield is an Australian poet, born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1964. In 1999 she instigated the Republic Readings in Hobart. For many years she was a poetry editor for Famous Reporter literary journal, and the young persons' liaison officer for the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Tasmanian branch. Winfield's collection Too Much Happens appeared from Cornford Press in 2003. Her second collection, Catalogue of Love – a chapbook from Walleah Press – was launched at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in Launceston in October 2006. In 2010 she won the Norma and Colin Knight Poetry Award.

Grace Yee is a poet, writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. Her PhD research (University of Melbourne, 2016) focused on settler Chinese women's storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Grace's work has appeared in Overland, Island, Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Rabbit, Cordite Poetry Review, The Shanghai Literary Review, Women's Museum of California, Hainamana, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, and Best of Australian Poems 2021, and 2022, among others. In 2020, Grace was awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, and the Peter Steele Poetry Award. She was a Creative Fellow at the State Library Victoria (2019-21), where she researched early settler Chinese Australian histories for a collection of poems, Light Traps: A History, forthcoming with Cordite Books in 2024. Her debut collection Chinese Fish, published by Giramondo, was awarded both the Victorian Premier's Award for Literature, and the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry, on Thursday 1st February 2024.