Anne Kellas

Who is Anne Kellas?

Anne Kellas is a South African poet, reviewer and editor.

She was born in Germiston in 1951 in what was then the Transvaal, now Gauteng, in South Africa. Her earliest work appeared in 1968 but she began writing seriously in 1975 when she met up with a group of writers associated with Lionel Abrahams who at one stage called themselves the Circle of Eight. This group gathered around Lionel Abrahams had included at various times the writers Anne Schuster, Sinclair Beilis, Basil Du Toit, Debbie Aarons, novelist, critic and editor Ivan Vladislavic, academic and publisher Shirley Pendlebury, Michael Gardiner, Francis Faller, and others. An earlier incarnation of this group had included Robert and Eva Royston, who later moved to the UK.

Anne Kellas's first book of poetry, Poems from Mt Moono, was published by Shirley Pendlebury's Hippogriffe Press in 1989. By this time Kellas and her husband, the journalist/photographer/writer Giles Hugo had already emigrated to Australia. In Tasmania she served for many years as poetry editor for the small magazine Famous Reporter and from circa 2003 was web content editor for Island.