Marcella Polain
Marcella Polain, born in 1958 in Singapore, is an Australian poet, novelist and short‑story writer. She moved to Australia at age two with her Irish father and Armenian mother. She studied literature and creative arts at Curtin University, briefly attended the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, and earned a Postgraduate Diploma in Secondary Education. She completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia.
Polain joined Perth's poetry scene in the early 1990s and helped start the WEB women's readings, which brought guests like Dorothy Porter and Gig Ryan to Perth. She has been a poetry editor for Westerly and Blue Dog, and co-edited Australian Poetry Journal Vol. 11 in 2024 with Andy Jackson. She taught writing at Murdoch University and UWA for about 10 years and later became a Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
Her first novel, The Edge of the World, is about her family's survival during the Armenian genocide. It won the UWA Higher Degree by Research Prize for Publications and was nominated for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional Best First Book. Her poetry has appeared internationally and in translation. She received an Australia Council Grant for New Work of Fiction, leading to Driving into the Sun (2019).
In 2012 she and visual artist Paul Uhlmann started fold editions, a small press that makes handmade books. She has worked with musicians, dancers and other artists. In 2015 the Armenian translation of The Edge of the World was published in Yerevan for the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, as part of the Global Conference Against Genocide. That year she won the International Grand Prize for Poetry from the Academia Orient Occident.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:53 (CET).