Senior Lecturer, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University
Dr Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia aged two, with her Irish father and Armenian mother. She has a background in theatre and film, and has published six books (four poetry collections; two novels), lyric essays, and other essays on writing. Her work has won or been short-listed for a number of prizes, including the Anne Elder Award and a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and has been published internationally and in translation. In 2015, she was awarded a Gold Medal by the Writers' Association of Armenia.
Marcella is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. There, with visual artist Paul Uhlmann, she co-founded 'fold editions', dedicated to the production of hand-made books. Marcella has been poetry editor for Blue Dog, Westerly and, most recently, co-editor for Australian Poetry 11. She has also edited numerous manuscripts and mentored emerging writers, many to publication - work she particularly enjoys.
Marcella has a special interest in challenging boundaries of form, and in cultural displacement, hybridity and in-betweenness. At present, she is developing a braided illness memoir exploring ongoing effects of genocide and the impact of the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Armenians from Artsakh (Nagarno-Karabkh).