Cirrus@Austlit

Wiradjuri woman Dr Jeanine Leane, from south-west New South Wales, grew up on a sheep farm near Gundagai and was educated in Gundagai, Wagga Wagga, Armidale, and Canberra. In 1983, Jeanine was conferred her BA in Literature and History from the University of New England, Armidale, and in 1984 she was awarded a Graduate Diploma of Education from the University of Canberra. After a long career in teaching at secondary and tertiary levels, Jeanine was conferred her PhD in the literature of Aboriginal representation by the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2011.

She has been an Indigenous Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), and has held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Jeanine was the National Coordinator for BlackWords during 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Jeanine became a recipient of the Australian Research Council Discovery grant for her project 'Reading the Nation: A Critical Study of Aboriginal/Settler Representations in the Contemporary Australian Literary Landscape'.

In 2010, Jeanine's first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: AD 1887-1961 won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry from the Australian Poets' Union, after it had been shortlisted in the David Unaipon Awards in 2006. Her poetry has been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, the Journal for the Association European Studies of Australia, and the Australian Book Review.

Jeanine's novel manuscript Purple Threads won the David Unaipon Award for 2010 at the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, and the following year was published by the University of Queensland Press (UQP). Purple Threads was also shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize and the Victorian Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing.

Widely published on the topic of Aboriginal literature, she has taught creative writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne.