Jeanine Leane
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and essayist from southwest New South Wales. In addition to her creative writings Jeanine is passionate about First Nations Literary critique that is both culturally grounded and rigorous in its engagement with the dynamic, diverse and growing body of First Nations creative works across a range of genres; and that asserts a sovereign evaluative framework rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. In literary critique, cultural rigour is the resonance of cultural values in First Nations’ literature; it rejects the limitations of Western critical standards, demanding that First Nations’ texts be read through their own cultural, relational, and historical contexts rather than fitted into settler-colonial expectations.
In 2020 Jeanine was the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship, Sydney Review of Books. She produced a series of essays which modelled frameworks for culturally grounded literary criticism. In 2023 Jeanine was the recipient of the inaugural Rosemary van den Berg Prize for First Nations Criticism offered jointly by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. This prize honours outstanding critical writing by a First Nations critic.
Image Credit: Dean Tirkot
