About Ella

Ella was born in 1991 and grew up in northern New South Wales. She is an award-winning poet and editor.

Her debut collection of poetry, Dead Bolt, was published in June 2020 and won the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award. She is a recipient of the 2019 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poems, essays and criticism appear in journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Southerly, Island, Westerly, Best Australian Poems and many others. She has performed her work as part of the Emerging Writers Festival, the Digital Writers Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival.

Ella co-edits Stilts, a triannual digital poetry journal, and is poetry editor of the Australian academic journal Social Alternatives. She holds a PhD from Queensland University of Technology and lives in Brisbane.

About Ella’s work

Ella’s first collection, Dead Bolt, was released in June 2020. Her second collection of poetry will explore questions about consumption and inheritance, memory and dwelling, aging and rebuilding. Can a house ever really be empty? Can a city? Do traces remain even if nobody has ever lived there? What should be done with empty places – houses, hotels, towns, cities?

Abandoned, empty and unfinished buildings all over the world are symptoms of overconsumption, housing insecurity, declining or aging populations, environmental disaster; they are emblematic of deep-seated social, cultural and economic anxieties. 

Ella has received the Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for Environmental Writing to commence work on this project in 2020, supported by a three-week residency at Varuna, the Writers House. She has been invited to continue her work on the manuscript as part of Bundanon’s artist-in-residence program.