Sara M Saleh's collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat wins the Anne Elder Award

A massive congratulations to Sara M Saleh for winning the 2023 Anne Elder Award with her first full length poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat.

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 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.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women’s identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.

Saleh’s poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara’s family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country’s most compelling, contemporary poets.

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.

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.

Congratulations again to the incredible, Sara M Saleh.