Marcella Polain

Marcella Polain (born 1958) is an Australian-resident poet, novelist and short fiction writer. She was born in Singapore and with her family migrated to Australia at the age of two with her Irish father and Armenian mother. Her father died when Marcella was ten, and it is this loss and her mother's survival of the Armenian Genocide that greatly inform her work. She studied Literature and Creative Arts at WAIT (now Curtin), where she was active in writing for and taking roles in stage productions. This is also where she learned to use a still camera, a continuing passion. She went to Sydney to study film at the AFTRS and worked briefly as a screen writer. After travelling the world, she returned to Perth to take a Post Grad Dip in Secondary Education and worked as a high school teacher for a few years. The breakup of her marriage with two little children forced changes in her work life that allowed her to concentrate on writing poems. She entered the vibrant Perth poetry scene in the early 90s, and was immediately fortunate to both meet fellow poets who supported her work and to secure grants from the WA Dept of Culture and the Arts that enabled her to continue writing and developing her first two collections. In the early to mid 1990s, she was a founding member (along with Morgan Yasbincek, Julia Lawrinson, Tracey Ryan and Sarah French) 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, during which time she began her PhD at University of Western Australia. Her first novel, "The Edge of the World'" was written for that degree, and won the University's Higher Degree by Research Prize for Publications. A revised version of her PhD's critical essay "The Stubborn Murmur" was long-listed for the 2010 Calibre Essay Prize. She is now a Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University. The Edge of the World was also nominated for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Regional best first book award. It has since been translated and released in Romania, and an Armenian translation and publication is planned. In 2013, Marcella was an invited poet at the inaugural International Poetry Festival in Armenia. Her poetry has also been published there, as well as in India, Romania and the USA. She is currently completing a second novel about what happens to children when their father disappears.