Reid, Ell win 2022 Anne Elder Award

Australian Poetry has announced Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone (Cordite Books) and Theodore Ell’s Beginning In Sight (RWP) as the joint winners of the 2022 Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry.

Prize judges Gig Ryan, Ella Jeffery and Marjan Mossammaparast also chose three highly commended titles from ‘an enormous amount of first book entries, in a notably powerful year’: No Camellias (Rebecca Cheers, Rabbit Books), Pressed Specimens (Moya Costello, Beir Bua Press), and At the Altar of Touch (Gavin Yuan Gao, UQP).

‘What was distinctive in the winners and commended titles, although extraordinarily different, was that these first books shared an overall consistency of accomplishment throughout; they were able to sustain the peaks of their best poems,’ the judges said.

Established in 1977 and valued at $1000, the annual Anne Elder Award is awarded to the best sole-authored first book of poetry in Australia. For more information, see the Australian Poetry website.

Category: Local news