Interviews

Anne Kellas interviewed by Ralph Wessman of Walleah Press,
online, August–October 2023

Anne Kellas and Ben Walter in conversation
Fullers Bookshop, 2016 (online thanks to Walleah Press)

Extract:

BEN WALTER: I get a sense in a lot of your poetry that it's not what I'd read in the work of another Tasmanian poet. Partly, I think, this is true on the level of content. At one point late in the collection you write, 'this is nature poet country, I'm a stranger here'. But it's also in terms of the form, the shape of the sentences. I love the sinews of your text, and the way your images burst through at times. I wondered if you could start by commenting on this and how you feel your writing is distinct in this way, and where this comes from.
Full text at: https://walleahpress.com.au/communion6-Kellas-Walter.html

Ivan Vladislavic in conversation with Anne Kellas
online, 2005
The ABSA/LitNet Chain Interview series

Extract:

VLADISLAVIC: In one of the early poems you wrote in Tasmania, you expressed a "livid fear" of forgetting your past. But I imagine that looking back made it more difficult for you to root yourself in your new territory, a process also dealt with in your work. Lionel Abrahams remarked that you had "made homesickness your home". How have you managed this tension between remembering and forgetting over the years?

VLADISLAVIC: Rereading Poems from Mt Moono and Isolated States today, I was struck by a couple of qualities that seem to be connected. There is something dreamlike, and often nightmarish, just below the surface in your most domestic poems. An item of furniture or the view from a suburban window suddenly becomes threatening or horrifying. There is also a particularly hard sense of materiality: the poems are full of metallic substructures breaking through surfaces; they are weighted with iron, stone, cement. Could you say something about these qualities? [Continue reading]

Older interviews with Kellas:

"A career spanning two continents: Anne Kellas, poet: South Africa's loss, Tasmania's gain", interview conducted by Robert Cox, Forty Degrees South, n.22, October 2001, pp.68-69.

“Out of Africa”, interview conducted by Margaretta Pos, The Mercury, Saturday 1 November 2001.