The three judges for the 2018 Anne Elder Award panel are Bonny Cassidy, Des Cowley and Gig Ryan. Gig is a former recipient of this significant award.
Bonny Cassidy is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Chatelaine (Giramondo, 2017), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and QLD Premier’s Literary Awards. Bonny is Reviews Editor for Cordite Poetry Review and runs the Creative Writing program at RMIT University.
Des Cowley is the History of the Book manager at State Library of Victoria, and has more than twenty-five years’ experience working with rare books. Des was a judge for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2010, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Fiction and Poetry in 2015 and 2016. He is the book reviewer for Rhythms magazine, and has published widely in journals. He previously edited the literary broadside Overland Extra, is on the editorial panel of Script & Print, and is an editorial advisor for Australian Book Review. Des is co-curator of the State Library of Victoria’s on-going exhibition World of the Book. He is co-author of The World of the Book (Melbourne University Press in 2007) and co-editor of Creating and Collecting Artists’ Books in Australia (2015).
Gig Ryan’s seventh book, New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011; Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), was winner of the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the 2012 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has also written songs with Disband, Six Goodbyes (1988), and Driving Past, Real Estate (1999), Travel(2006). She was Poetry Editor of The Age from 1998 – 2016. She is a freelance reviewer, and is currently working on another book of poems.