The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Judges 2008

Jennifer Strauss (Convenor)

Jennifer Strauss, born at Heywood in Victoria’s Western District, joined the Monash University Department of English in 1964 and has been an Honorary Research Fellow there since 1999. Her teaching and research fields have been medieval literature, women’s writing and Australian literature. She has spoken widely on the latter at universities and conferences in Europe and North America: her recent award of an AM in the Order of Australia cites her ‘services as an academic and scholar to Australian literature and poetry’ in addition to her contribution to organisation concerned with women’s and industrial issues. She has four published collections of poetry, the fourth being Tierra del Fuego: New and Selected Poems, and is represented in a range of literary journals and anthologies of Australian poetry, while poems have been translated into Italian, Greek, German, French and Slovenian. In addition to numerous reviews, entries in literary bibliographies and reference works, articles and chapters in books, her publications include critical books on Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright. She has co-edited The Oxford Literary History of Australia and edited The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, Family Ties: Australian Poems of the Family and, most recently, the two-volume Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore.

Claire Gaskin

Peter Rose

Peter Rose has published four poetry collections to date, most recently Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2005). Giramondo will publish his new collection, Morbid Transfers. In 2001 he published Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin), a family memoir that won the National Biography Award in 2002. He has also published a novel, A Case of Knives (Allen & Unwin, 2005) and edited The Best Australian Poems 2007 (Black Inc.). Throughout the 1990s he was a publisher at Oxford University Press in Australia. Currently, he is Editor of Australian Book Review.