Jeanine Leane wins Canberra Critics Circle Award for poetry
Congratulations to Jeanine Leane on her 2024 Canberra Critics Circle Award for her poetry collection, Gawimarra: Gathering.
The Canberra Critics Circle Awards is an annual event that recognizes outstanding work in various art forms in Canberra. The circle changes each year depending on who is writing or broadcasting on the arts in Canberra. The awards include categories such as writing, visual arts, theatre, and more.
This superb collection moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, culture and kinship, to experimental archival poems dissecting the violence and destruction of the settler-colony. Jeanine Leane’s poems are richly palpable in texture, imagery and language, layering the personal with the political, along with a sharp-tongued telling of history. Cleverly divided into three parts, ‘Gathering’, ‘Nation’ and ‘Returning’, Gawimarra weaves back and forth in a dedication to strong matriarchs, and the core acts of gathering and returning – memory, language, history – resonate powerfully throughout. This remarkable book is the result of decades of poetic, political, and cultural work and reflection.
Sara Saleh says of the collection:
‘The poems in Gawimarra dare speak the unspeakable, a subverted elegy in which the subject Country exists with urgency and vitality. Poet Jeanine Leane uses the act of gathering to both structure this collection and destabilise the status quo, the implications of which sever us from our world and tether us to that of the poems and all that they promise. Gawimarra is an awakening, a shaking to the core – and I am still shaking, long after I have put it down.’
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west NSW. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887–1961, won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry; her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award; and her latest book is the poetry collection Gawimarra. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative nonfiction. She was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Poetry twice. In 2023 she won the David Harold Tribe Award for Poetry, Australia’s richest poetry prize. She has been the recipient of a Red Room Poetry Fellowship and two Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowships. Jeanine taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature for many years at the University of Melbourne. She is the poetry editor of Meanjin.
Congratulations again to Jeanine.
