About Shari Lynelle
A poet, writer, researcher, mentor, therapist and thinker.
Also known as Shari Kocher.
Shari Lynelle is an award winning Australian poet, fiction-writer, mentor and therapist, who is also Deaf. She holds a BA from Flinders University, an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Melbourne University, and a Diploma in Remedial Massage, as well as a Certificate in AUSLAN. Shari uses bi-lateral cochlear implants, which she only chose to do later in life, with over a decade between the two surgical interventions. Her interests include eco-critical feminist poetics and art practices, somatic education, poetry & verse novels, First Nations Literatures and contemporary climate-change-nature writing.
Shari is the author of two poetry collections published by the acclaimed independent Australian press, Puncher & Wattmann: The Non-Sequitur of Snow (2015) and Foxstruck and Other Collisions (2021). The former was Highly Commended in the Fellowship of Australian Authors' Anne Elder Awards (2015) and the latter was Highly Commended in the NSW Premier’s Literature Prize, for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize (2022).
Recipient of a Felix Meyer Scholarship and an Australian Postgraduate Award, Shari earned her PhD at Melbourne University in 2015 with a critical thesis on subjectivity and embodiment in the writings of Dorothy Porter and Anne Carson and a deconstructed verse novel inspired by the work of high-altitude archaeologist, Dr. Constanza Ceruti. This adventurous creative work, Sonqoqui, was futher supported by a Melbourne Abroad Travel Scholarship, the M.A. Bartlett Research Scholarship and a Graduate Research in the Arts Travel Scheme Award, and later, the Peter Steele Poetry Award. The resulting manuscript combines poetic biography with a lyric interpretation of the lives of three Inca children who lived five hundred years ago.
Widely anthologised, Shari’s written work has been featured in literary journals in Australia and elsewhere spanning three decades. Her work continues to appear in The Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Poems, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Meanjin, Overland, Peripheries (Harvard), Plumwood Mountain Journal, Rabbit: a Journal of Non-fiction Poetry, Southerly, and Westerly, among others. Notable awards include the Blue Knot Foundation Award (2021), the Peter Steele Poetry Award (2019), The Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award (2018), and the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize in (2016). Over the years, the Newcastle Poetry Prize has also recognised some of Shari’s longer poems with second, third and shortlisted placements (2015, 2017, 2019, 2024).
Her current creative directions include a new poetry collection and a book of short fiction, in tandem. The poetry combines ekphrastic with ecofeminist approaches, while the book of short fiction explores writing that has evolved through awareness through movement techniques as an integral methodology in the creative process.
Shari lives and writes and rests as a guest on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples in Central Victoria (Australia) where she pays tribute to past, present and future community and to the ancestors and keepers of Bunjil’s law.
To view her work, follow the links below.
Curious about language, place, and how we make meaning.
Close-up view of a stained, textured piece of paper with small marks, spots, and faint pink streaks.
A small waterfall flows into a creek surrounded by large granite and greenstone rocks and lush green trees in a natural setting in the Paluma National Park. The traditional owners of this place, Munan Gumburu or "Misty Mountain" where this photograph was taken, are the Nywaigi people. Shari Lynelle was born not far from here.
Abstract expressionist excerpt with black brushstrokes, splatters, and splashes of color including gold, pink, orange, purple, and red on a gray background
Pressed leaves and feathers printed on wet silk with some muted colour tones and spots.
A Monarch butterfly with black and orange wings resting on a rock near a muddy path in a busy area. Photograph taken on Yunbenun country.
Close-up of textured and granular sheets of handmade paper with small brown and black dirt particles and folds.
Where writing begins with paying attention and being in place.
Fieldwork and residencies offer space and time for the practices to deepen and to integrate. Time to gather, to listen, and to immerse the project in place. These experiences are often porous, sometimes ephemeral, and always guided by embodied attention. Whose Country we are on matters, and the traversal of such animate mattering invites reflection and reciprocity. The writing unfolds in relationship with ground, with silence, and with embodied listening. What comes through is not only the work itself, but a way of being in the making — slower, more textured, rooted in lived experience.
