The winner of the Anne Elder Award 2023 is Sara M Saleh with The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023)
General comments from the judging panel Jeanine Leane, Panda Wong and Harry Reid:
As judges, we were struck by the breadth of style, form, and subject matter in this year’s entries. Stylistically, work ranged from the formally conventional to poetry that challenged the form’s limits. This included multi-lingual poetry that straddled different histories and cultures; visually playful and experimental poetry; poetry that referenced the archive; poetry of resistance and protest; and poetry imagining alternative futures. Topics explored included racism, colonialism, feminism, the Anthropocene, gender, capitalism, crisis, and identity. The Winner and Highly Commended titles are all debuts that are ambitious in scope and imagination, offering new ways of distilling the world into words.
The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal El-Banat by Sara M Saleh—Winner. Published by UQP.
The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal El-Banat announces a defiant, powerful new voice to Australian poetry. Sara Saleh writes superbly crafted, sharp, taut, moving poems from a place of deep conviction and intention. Her poems move from deeply personal and tender meditations on stolen homelands, intergenerational histories of displacement to experimental activist poems that dissect and lay bare the violence, hubris, hypocrisy and continuing genocide of settler colonialism.
Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s Awards. Her first poetry collection is The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal, the Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize and won the Anne Elder Award.
Sara is the first poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, a Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant writers residency in Brooklyn, New York, amongst other honours.
Sara is based on Bidjigal land with her partner and their beloved three cats and pup.
HIGHLY COMMENDED:
These Are Different Waters by Ella Skilbeck-Porter—Highly Commended. Published by Vagabond.
Formally daring, Skilbeck-Porter’s debut is a confident collection that moves elegantly and effortlessly through concrete and lyric poetry. Skilbeck-Porter has developed a poetics that feels truly new and invigorating, characterised by both an eye for intricacy and a steady, guiding formal hand. These Are Different Waters is a significant accomplishment in form, but more importantly, style.
Ella Skilbeck-Porter is a poet and artist living on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. She is a PhD student in French Studies at the University of Melbourne and her writing has appeared in journals including HEAT, Rabbit, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Going Down Swinging and Otoliths, among others. Her debut collection of poetry and visual poetry These Are Different Waters was published in 2023 by Vagabond Press and has been shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest and the Mary Gilmore Award.
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee—Highly Commended. Published by Giramondo.
Polyphonic in nature and gutsy in approach, Chinese Fish speaks against the sanitised, whitewashed, one-note ‘model migrant’ story. Moving back and forth across multiple languages, forms and genres, Yee illuminates the fractured and complicated histories of Chinese migration in Aotearoa. Her devotional attention to the extraordinary details of ordinary lives makes this a collection that yields more with each read.
Grace Yee lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised across Australia and internationally, and has been awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, and a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria. Chinese Fish (Giramondo Publishing) was originally written as part of a PhD thesis (University of Melbourne) on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
The Djinn Hunters by Nadia Niaz—Highly Commended. Published by Rabbit
Concrete poetry and multilingual elements create a palimpsest of language, memory and ritual. Dance is a common motif in this collection, Niaz’s poems traversing the page with a fluid physicality and musicality. The Djinn Hunters is a debut embodied by rich textures, evocative imagery and playfulness in form.
Nadia Niaz is the author of The Djinn Hunters (2023, Rabbit Press) and the founder and editor of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project. Her work has appeared in national and international publications including Kalliope X, Usawa Literary Review, The Polyglot, Not Very Quiet, and Rabbit. Most recently, her work was featured in Reading the City of Literature: A celebration of a year of Melbourne writing and publishing (2023). She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne. is the author of The Djinn Hunters (2023, Rabbit Press) and the founder and editor of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project. Her work has appeared in national and international publications including Kalliope X, Usawa Literary Review, The Polyglot, Not Very Quiet, and Rabbit. Most recently, her work was featured in Reading the City of Literature: A celebration of a year of Melbourne writing and publishing (2023). She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne.
ON THE AWARD:
The Anne Elder Award is named after Anne Elder (1918-1976), a dancer with the Borovansky Ballet in the 1940s who later in life became a notable poet. Her poetry attracted praise from many critics for its vigour, depth of reference and distinctive artistry. Sponsored by Anne Elder’s family via the Australian Communities Foundation, this prestigious, national, annual award is for a sole-authored first book of poetry of 20-minimum pages in length, published in Australia.
Established in 1977, the prize has offered important recognition to poets at a critical point in their writing lives, and its alumni represent some of Australia’s best-known and highly regarded poets. Australian Poetry has been project managing the award since the 2019 Award. Judging is carried out by an independent, highly knowledgeable panel, renewed each year by Australian Poetry in consultation with the sponsor. The winner is awarded $1,000, and there is also the opportunity for the judging panel to award other books a high commendation.
Books published between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2023 were eligible for entry into the 2023 Anne Elder Award. There were more than 50 books entered, which is a record number since 2019.