Saleh wins Anne Elder Award 2023

Australian Poetry has announced Sara M Saleh as the winner of the Anne Elder Award 2023 for a first book of poetry for The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023).

Judges Jeanine Leane, Panda Wong and Harry Reid said that the book ‘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.’

Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Alongside The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat, Saleh also recently published her debut novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Multicultural NSW Award at the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and co-edited the 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity (Picador). Saleh won the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat has also been shortlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal and the Mary Gilmore Award.

Australian Poetry also announced three highly commended titles: These Are Different Waters (Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Vagabond), Chinese Fish (Grace Yee, Giramondo), and The Djinn Hunters (Nadia Niaz, Rabbit).

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. Last year, the prize was awarded jointly to Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone (Cordite Books) and Theodore Ell’s Beginning in Sight (RWP). More information about the prize is available on the Australian Poetry website.

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