General comments
Jeanine Leane, Theodore Ell, and Ella Skilbeck-Porter (2024 Anne Elder Judging Panel).
The thirty-seven debut poetry collections entered into the 2024 Anne Elder Award offered windows into a range of poetic styles and modes. This year the range of works encompassed themes of ecosystems and explorations of natural worlds, poetry of birth and child-rearing, biography and personal history, dreams and the unconscious, as well as intermedial experiments and the merging of word and image. The overall quality of entries was high across a range of different topics and poetic forms. Coming up with a shortlist and winner was no easy feat – there were many more impressive debut collections than we could shortlist, or longlist, if that were part of the process. The Winner, Highly Commended and Commended titles stood out to us for their impressive entanglements of poetic voice, content and form. These books are powerful, deeply felt invocations that all bring something new to language and to the contemporary Australian poetry landscape.
Winner
Raw Salt, Izzy Roberts-Orr (Vagabond Press)
Raw Salt impresses as a magnificent collection of lyric craft and poetic invention. Roberts-Orr traverses landscapes and griefscapes through poems that display a quiet and genuine confidence in lyric form. Every poem in Raw Salt achieves emotional realism and is maximally realised, offering arresting effects in imagery and aphoristic insight, and speaking in a coherent, distinctive and persuasive voice. Thoughtfully curated and finely concentrated, the poems bring about a change in feeling, moving from grief at family loss to an outlook on life that is wary of illusions. Raw Salt is an extraordinarily skilled and impressive debut. It is a joy to tread these expansive poems that reveal more depth with each reading.
Izzy Roberts-Orr is a poet, writer, and performance maker based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in Regional Victoria. Her work spans poetry, theatre, audio, and site-responsive art, often exploring themes of intimacy, grief, and transformation. Her debut poetry collection, Raw Salt (Vagabond Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the Colorado Prize for Poetry.
A recipient of the BR Whiting Residency (Rome, 2026), ASAL Fellowship (2025) and Varuna’s Pitch Me! Fellowship (2024), her performance and interdisciplinary works have been commissioned by Forest Fringe, Melbourne Fringe, Junction Arts Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, ATYP, You Are Here, and Young Arts Paris. She has held residencies at Bundanon and The Wheeler Centre, and was awarded the Marten Bequest Scholarship for Poetry.
Izzy is currently developing Medusa is a Modern Woman, a new work that reimagines the famous gorgon in contemporary times. Using the “metaphysical I” (Lasky, 2013) of persona poetry, the work interrogates rape culture, power dynamics, and survival while imagining liberatory future possibilities.
She also works as Creative Producer for Red Room Poetry, commissioning and curating poetry projects across digital and live platforms.
Highly Commended
rock flight, Hasib Hourani (Giramondo Publishing)
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. It depicts the restlessness and fragmentation of the diaspora through a series of fleeting objects and objects in flight – missiles, bombs, rocks and date-stones punctuate the poems as Hourani renders the flight and devastation of Israeli occupation on Palestinian people wherever they are ‘scattered now’. This scattering of peoples, cultures, histories, memories, stories, families and possessions, amid rocks, stones, bullets, missiles, bombs and the ongoing genocide of occupation is fragmented, shifting and ever fluctuating across the length of the book, which is itself an object of confinement, limited by the sharp-cornered, white space of the angular page. In this way, Hourani creates a new language to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both at home and in diaspora.
Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on unceded Gadigal Country. His debut book, rock flight was released with Giramondo (AU) and Prototype (UK) in 2024, and with New Directions (US) in 2025. rock flight won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the New South Wales Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.
Highly Commended
Makarra, Barrina South (Recent Work Press)
Makarra, a debut collection by Barkinji poet Barrina South, is simultaneously visceral, tender, personal and political as it speaks in uncompromising, lyric language to the poet’s homeland, Blak sisterhood, motherhood, womanhood, kinship and friendship. The title of the collection is taken from the Barkinji word for rain, makarra. South showers readers with beautifully crafted evocative poems that draw on memory, place and people, in a seamless braid and flow, moving like the Barka River – the poet’s ancestral home and grounded in love of people, language and Country. These poems move bravely through trauma and resilience, all the while attuned to the presences and the resonances of the non-human world, and to the voices of the land and the Ancestors.
Barrina is a Barkindji poet and critic. As a Red Room Poet, in 2023 Barrina was commissioned to write an ekphrastic poem for the National Gallery of Australia and her short story ‘Family Tree’ was adapted for the stage by the Mill Theatre, Canberra. In 2024, Barrina was awarded a Varuna First Nation fellowship, 2024 MARION Mentorship for early-career writers to work with Australian poet Dan Hogan and was a judge for the 2024 ACT Book of the Year. In the same year she presented a paper at the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry in New Zealand on the experience of being one of five Australian poets selected to participate in the ‘Invisible Walls: poetry as a Doorway to Intercultural Understanding’ paired with a Korean poet engaging in cross-cultural dialogue. Her work has featured in the Griffith Review, Rabbit, Cordite Poetry Review, Kuracca anthology, The Rocks Remain: Blak Poetry and Story anthology plus Duniyaadaari and Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, both based in Kolkata, India.
In 2025, Barrina published her debut poetry collection titled Makarra, through Recent Work Press. Makarra was Highly Commended in the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and short listed in the 2025 Mary Gilmore Award.
Commended
Naag Mountain, Manisha Anjali (Giramondo Publishing)
An epic sweep through a collective unconscious and a dream-world connecting India, Fiji, Aotearoa and Australia. This book of prose poems presents a transcendent journey driven/guided by the dreams of the “friends across the Tasman, dreaming our dreams for us,” who are the spirits of stow-away hawkers. Naag Mountain is a deeply researched and deeply imagined exploration of the cultural memories and family lore of Indians who migrated to become indentured labourers on sugarcane plantations. Songs and hidden instruments, snakes and cane toads, flowering trees, Toyotas, folk figures, surrealist metamorphoses, remembered images and visions, segments of speech and journey – the elements of this book find resonance through the medium of the ocean, which connects places, people and histories, and which evokes the possibility of larger freedoms beneath and beyond oppression.
Manisha Anjali is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024). Naag Mountain was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, longlisted for the Stella Prize and highly commended at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Manisha has been a recipient of the Neilma Sidney Travel Grant, BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency at Mooramong, a Writer-in-Residence at Incendium Radical Library and a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. She has lived in Fiji, Aotearoa and Australia.
Commended
If Movement Was A Language, Svetlana Sterlin (Vagabond Press)
A highly individual work that depicts the life-world of the poet as swimming coach, whose intimate experiences of water, buoyancy, speed, fluidity and the locales of swimming pools become symbols of growing up between far-flung countries, societies and languages. Acting as a set of ‘theme and variations,’ the poems achieve a strong sense of character and of devoted attachment to the act and associations of swimming, achieving fresh effects and perspectives with each iteration, and evoking the confidence that arises from daring to test boundaries.
Svetlana Sterlin is the author of Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award winning poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language (Vagabond Press). A swimming coach and former swimmer, she lives in Meanjin, where she writes prose, poetry, and screenplays. Her work appears in Westerly, Island, Cordite, Australian Poetry, and elsewhere. She is also the founding editor of swim meet lit mag.
We thank the 2024 Anne Elder Judging Panel for their work, including citations and judges’ comments. Australian Poetry congratulates Izzy Roberts-Orr, as well as all the highly commended (Hasib Hourani, Barrina South) and commended (Manisha Anjali, Svetlana Sterlin) poets.