Hello. I’m an Australian author. This is my writer bio.

My debut essay collection Blueberries (2020) was published by Text Publishing in Australia and Scribe in the UK. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and long-listed for the Stella Prize. You can buy it here. I’m currently working on my first novel, an anarchist comedy. 

New writing is appearing or has recently appeared in Daunt Books’ anthology By The River (2024), The Cambridge History of the American Essay (2024), Griffith Review (2024), Meanjin (2023), HEAT (2023), Sydney Review of Books (2023), and Par Femme magazine (2023).

Over the years, my articles, essays, and short prose works have appeared in the hundreds, in literary journals and reviews including Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, Overland, Cordite, Mirror Lamp Press, Kill Your Darlings,The Big Issue Fiction Edition and The Lifted Brow (where I was an editor for five years); in periodicals like The Age, Guardian Weekend and Eureka Street, where I wrote a monthly cultural politics column between 2011-2016; and in the anthologies Open Secrets (2021), Choice Words (2019), The Best of the Lifted Brow: Volume Two (2017), Poetic Justice (2014), and The Emerging Writer (2013). I’ve had new work commissioned for gallery and performance contexts via Darebin City Council, Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, Liquid Architecture, and ArtsHouse. I also published a chapbook Yellow City with The Atlas Review in 2019. My work has been supported by the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, Creative Victoria, Copyright Agency Limited, Australia Council for the Arts, and the Australasian Postgraduate Award (RTP). 

In 2019, I earned a PhD from Monash University. My thesis traced the contemporary essay’s genealogy in three directions: its liberal-Humanist origins; its complex foothold within the university; and its deployment as a socially engaged literary form in the wake of second-wave feminism, bringing it into conversation with contemporary social movements including #MeToo. Both the creative and critical components of my thesis were concerned with how literary genre is ideologically regulated, ‘legitimised’ and institutionalised. As a reader and educator, I’m interested in the expanded possibilities of ideas-based prose, including the essay, life writing, the novel, scholarly nonfiction, and hybrid prose forms, to articulate the stakes and contradictions of contemporary subjectivity and citizenship. I’m also increasingly interested in (obsessed with) the matter and concept of waste.

I’ve taught writing since 2015 at universities including the University of Melbourne, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the University of Birmingham, and at arts organisations including Writers Victoria and Writing South Australia. I’m available for manuscript consultations and tutoring online. If you’d like to inquire about a consultation, you can email me at ellenalksavage [at] gmail [dot] com.

I live in Athens with my husband, the fiction writer Dominic Amerena. Together with Panagiotis Kehagias and Work in Progress Studios, we host a reading series called Salad Days aimed at bringing local and international writers together. 

I’m represented by Daisy Parente at Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency, London. 

The portrait (selfie) of me above was taken on my phone. 

I’m taking a break from blurbing new books right now.