General comments

Theodore Ell, Manisha Anjali and Tim Loveday  (2025 Anne Elder Judging Panel).

We’d like to thank all those poets who put their work on the line. It has been a pleasure getting to read, engage with and discuss such a breadth and depth of new works. What we witnessed across the 33 collections entered into the 2025 Anne Elder Award, were themes of parenthood and class struggle, ecocide and end times, surrender and psychiatric distress, the surrealism and strangeness of nature, the complexities of intergenerational violence and wealth, and the absurdities and wonder of language in itself. It feels inadequate grouping these collections simply under the banner ‘debut’, especially considering they collectively prove, yet again, that so-called Australian poetry punches well above its weight class.

 

The winner and commended works stood out namely for their ambition, scope and inventiveness. They break and bend rules, subvert and reimagine poetic expectations, experiment in syntax, lineation, narrative stakes and form, each one governed by a wholly singular poetic voice. These collections not only contribute to our national poetry but extend our poetic imagination in new and unexpected ways. They are nothing short of a triumph.

 

Winner

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan (Giramondo Publishing)

Two Hundred Million Musketeers is an illustrious, spirited debut that beholds shifting inner worlds and geographies, polyphonic voices, and everyday lifeworlds. Drawing from the language of children, waged labour, history, Marxism, and travels from Melbourne to Türkiye, Başkan’s approach to poetry is playful, lively and experimental. Narratives and lifeworlds spill out with immense velocity. Poetic interrogations of speech and sound speak to traditions of migrant poets writing in English, like Ania Walwicz and Pi O. Başkan’s lines explode like fireworks – the collection holds the absurd rhythms, spontaneous expressions and joyous exclamations of the lived world. Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a radiant debut, outstanding in originality, experimentation and resonance.

 

Ender Başkan is a poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller living on unceded Wurundjeri land. His collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers, published by Giramondo, has been shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal. The winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, his writing has been found in Cordite, Meanjin, Overland, Unusual Work, Australian Book Review, KalliopeX, unMagazine, Best of Australian Poems and more. His novel A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man was published in 2019 by Vre Books Press, which he helped co-found along with Agog poetry readings and Study, an experimental space.

 

 

Highly Commended

Slipstream by Kristyn J. Saunders (Walleah Press)

 

A collection that combines utterly distinct technique with great emotional power, Slipstream bears witness to the disorientation and fear that attend a young person’s entry into hospital, and to the concern, self-doubt and yearning that risk overwhelming the bond between parent and child. Composed of fragments that are themselves broken down and partially redacted – only for the erasures to create their own layer of meaning – Slipstream bears witness powerfully to the desperate need to hold on to every scrap of meaning available in the deepest uncertainty and distress. The collection’s central conceit reveals an unexpected kind of adaptability and finds a special resonance, in the midst of a reality that seems to be fraying apart.

 

Kristyn J. Saunders lives on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne. She is a graduate of Deakin and Harvard Universities, and has a PhD in English & Comparative Literature, from Columbia University. Her debut book of poetry Slipstream was published by Walleah Press, 2025. She is a recent KSP Fellow and winner of a poetry award at the 2026 Nillumbik Contemporary Writing Prize. She is presently working on a book-length manuscript of poems exploring colonial psychiatry and eugenics in mid-20th-century New Zealand.

Highly Commended

Fivehundred Swimming Pools by Connor Weightman (Rabbit Poetry)

 

Driven by a sublime narratorial mode, Fivehundred Swimming Pools weaves together pop culture conceptions of the apocalypse with studied geopolitical, statistical and historical examinations of the ecocide as its fuelled by our mass consumption of oil. From disaster films to Fitzroy petrol stations to climate symptoms, Weightman scales the banality of slow violence in documentary poetics that uses historical records, cinema, autobiography, and documentation from the ongoing oil crisis as source material, and so articulates compelling, immensely original, deeply researched scenes. As everyday life is connected by oil, poems are connected by roads, and the characters that traverse them come to represent the collective voice. Weightman reckons with the inadequacies and foibles of individual action, calling to account the corporate-industrial-destruction-complex, and the many arms that enable it. The minuity of life slithers through, revealing to us time and again our complicity, the unbearable complexities of the systems we find ourselves enriched and dependent upon, and ironically, just as impoverished by. This is an ambitious, finely tuned and kaleidoscopic debut that is huge in scope and equally eviscerating.

 

Connor Weightman grew up in Perth/Boorloo and currently lives in Melbourne/Naarm. His poetry has appeared in Westerly, Cordite and Plumwood Mountain. He holds a PhD in creative writing/environmental humanities from Charles Sturt University.

 

 

Commended

Lithosphere by Ben Walter (Puncher & Wattmann)

 

Lithosphere is a delicately surreal, euphonic collection that offers a fresh, conceptual approach to nature poetry. Embracing slowness and opacity, the poet hikes through the layered geography of Lutruwita, where oysters roar, and rain on kunanyi transforms into a whale. Walter paints the agency of the natural world in unexpected, strangely delightful, and haunting ways. As well as the natural world, inanimate objects are anthropomorphised, crafting a lived world that is inherently conscious. Here, nature retains its mystery, and poems lean on ghostly roots, drunken ladders and Lutruwita orchids. Lithosphere is deserving of an ‘unshucked applause’.

 

Ben Walter is a Walkley Award-winning essayist, a past fiction editor at Island, and the author of the books What Fear Was and Lithosphere. His work has appeared regularly in Australia’s major periodicals, including Meanjin, Overland, Island, Griffith Review and The Saturday Paper, and internationally in Poetry Ireland Review, 3:AM Magazine (France) and The Kenyon Review (US).

 

Commended

A Woman Talks to Her Tongue by Alison Gorman (5 Islands Press)

 

A collection in which craft is refined with a light touch and the weight of wisdom is borne with tenderness, A Woman Talks To Her Tongue shifts between the domains of folklore and of personal memory, negotiating the shadows cast over the present by both. Alison Gorman imagines ancient spaces and vignettes of family life with equal vividness and metaphoric richness, her disciplined forms consistently serving her gifts for visual evocation and for symbolic possibilities. A warm, thoughtful and thought-provoking debut collection.

 

Alison Gorman is a poet, teacher, and former speech pathologist who lives in Sydney.  Her poetry has appeared in Cordite, Island, Honest Ulsterman, Meanjin, Mslexia, Southerly and Southword. She was awarded the Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize in 2016 and a Varuna Residential Fellowship in 2023. Her poems have been shortlisted in the 2024 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, the Fish Poetry Prize and the Mslexia Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet was highly commended in the 2024 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, shortlisted in the Cinnamon Press Literature Awards the same year, and was a finalist in the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition in 2022. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. When Alison is not writing poetry, she teaches creative writing to children at Inkling Writing Studio, which she founded in 2018.

Commended

Past & Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz (UWA Publishing)

 

Past & Parallel Lives is an astonishing journey into inheritance and futurity. The poet’s inner world is extraterrestrial, a space where past and parallel selves embody fields of light, fluid desire and science fiction characters. Vivid images of reincarnation, time travel, Star Trek, and dreams mobilise the exploration of self, queerness and migration. Formally inventive and lyrically fecund, Past & Parallel Lives is a constellation of experiments that challenges our perceptions of time and space, while being heart-led. There is chaos, longing, and alternate worlds. Ortiz is a sublime and tender voice that embraces experimentation and possibility. This is a work of resplendent imagination.

 

Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and lutruwita/Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal,  Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020), among others. Their debut poetry collection Past & Parallel Lives won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award, and was published by UWAP in 2025. Kaya lives and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country.

 

We thank the 2025 Anne Elder Judging Panel for their work, including citations and judges’ comments. Australian Poetry congratulates Ender Başkan as well as all the highly commended (Kristyn J. Saunders, Connor Weightman) and commended (Ben Walter, Alison Gorman, Kaya Ortiz) poets.

The 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 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 respected poets. The winner is awarded $1,000, and there is also the opportunity for the judging panel to award other books a commendation or special mention.