Australian Poetry is delighted to announce the three judges for the Anne Elder Award 2025 panel are Theodore Ell, Manisha Anjali and Tim Loveday. Theodore was the Anne Elder Award 2022 co-winner with Harry Reid (a judge for the Award 2023) and Manisha was Commended in last year’s Award 2024. Tim has extensive readership and knowledge of new-release poetry books from their regular event curating for Readings Books and his active profile and support within poetry communities.
Anne Elder Award 2025 panel:
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.
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 lived in Fiji, Aotearoa and Australia.
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic living on Wurundjeri country. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2025 DHA, 2024 Montreal Poetry Prize, 2024 Big Australian Yarn, and 2023 David Harold Tribe Prize. Tim’s work has been widely published. His debut collection is forthcoming with UQP. He is the poetry editor at Island magazine. More: timloveday.com.
