Marcella Polain


Marcella Polain is an Australian-resident poet, novelist and short fiction writer.

Early life and education

Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia at the age of two with her Irish father and Armenian mother.
Polain studied Literature and Creative Arts at Western Australian Institute of Technology. For a short while she attended the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. At Western Australian Secondary Teachers' College, she took a Post Graduate Diploma in Secondary Education. Polain completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia.

Career

Polain entered the Perth poetry scene in the early 1990s. She was a founding member of Perth's WEB women's readings, which brought guests such as Dorothy Porter and Gig Ryan to Perth. She has been poetry editor for the literary magazines Westerly and Blue Dog. She tutored in Writing for 10 years at Murdoch University before becoming Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
Her first novel, The Edge of the World, based on her family's survival of the Armenian Genocide, won the University of Western Australia's Higher Degree by Research Prize for Publications, and was nominated for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional best first book award.
Her poetry has been published internationally, and she has been a recipient of an Australia Council Grant for New Work of Fiction. In 2012, she co-founded the micropress 'fold editions', dedicated to the creation of hand-made books. She has worked interdisciplinarily with composer-musicians, visual artists and dancer-choreographers.
In April 2015, the Armenian translation of The Edge of the World was launched in Yerevan at the Centenary Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, also part of the Global Conference Against Genocide. In 2015, Polain was also awarded the International Grand Prize for Poetry by the Academia Orient Occident.

Books

Poetry