The three judges for the 2019 Anne Elder Award panel are Gig Ryan, Marcella Polain and Rae White. Gig and Marcella are former recipients of this significant award, and Rae was commended in last year’s prize.
Marcella Polain was born in Singapore, and migrated to Australia with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing program at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Marcella has published three collections of poetry and two novels. Her most recent, Driving into the Sun (2019, Fremantle Press), was written with the assistance of an Australia Council grant. Her work has been published internationally and in translation, and has won or been short-listed for a number of awards, including the Anne Elder Award, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book.
Rae White is a non-binary transgender writer and the editor of #EnbyLife Journal. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth (University of Queensland Press) won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and commended in the 2018 Anne Elder Award.
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.