Authors

Dr Robyn Rowland AO has published nine books. Her work has been awarded a number of prizes. Silence & its tongues (2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Third generation Irish-Australian, Robyn has been reading and teaching in Ireland for 28 years, where she lives part-time in Connemara. She has read her poetry in Portugal, Ireland, the UK, the USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, where, along with Canada and Japan, she has also been published. Her poetry has been featured often on Australian national radio programs PoeticA and The Spirit of Things. Robyn is known for her moving readings, available on her CDs, Off the tongue and Silver Leaving – Poems & Harp. Robyn, an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, was Deputy Chair of the Board, Australian Poetry Centre (2007-2008); and Professor of Social Inquiry and Womens Studies at Deakin University (1981-1996), retiring in 1996 with breast cancer and burnout. She was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education and women?s health in 1996.

Grant Caldwell’s first book appeared in 1979 and glass clouds is his seventh collection of poetry. His work has been published widely in Australia, as well as in numerous overseas countries. He has received two Australia Council for the Arts Fellowships and his books have been short-listed for the Age Book of the Year Award and an Australian Human Rights Commission Award. He is the managing editor of the national poetry journal of The Australian Poetry Centre, Blue Dog, and he is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne.

After graduating in English and American literature and qualifying as a solicitor, Anna Kerdijk Nicholson migrated to Australia from England in 1989. As Artist-in-Residence at Bundanon in 1998 she wrote her first book of poetry, The Bundanon Cantos [FIP, 2003] which was mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Books of 2003. She has won the Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry and been a prizewinner in The Society of Women Writers National Poetry Prize. From 2004 to 2008 she edited Five Bells, the quarterly poetry journal of The Poets Union Inc. She has been the grateful recipient of New Work grants as an emerging and as a developing writer from the Australia Council for the Arts. She cycles to work in Sydney. Her new book, Possession: Poems about the voyage of Lt James Cook in the Endeavour 1768-1771, published by Five Islands Press in February 2010, has won the 2010 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry.

Susan Hampton is a poet and freelance editor who lives in Lyneham, Canberra. For many years she taught writing at universities. Her five books of poems include Costumes and A Latin Primer. Her poems and stories have won the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Dame Mary Gilmore Award, The Brian Eton Prize, and the Shire of Eltham Short Story Award. With Kate Llewellyn she co-edited The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986). In 1990 she won the Steele Rudd Award for Surly Girls. Her last book The Kindly Ones,, from Five Islands Press, was shortlisted for five awards, and won The Judith Wright Poetry Prize for 2006.

Canadian-born Ian McBryde has been a long term resident of Australia. He is well-published both nationally and overseas, and his poetry has been translated into several languages. His fourth mainstream collection, Domain, about WW2 and Europe under occupation, was published by Five Islands Press, and his third CD of spoken-word is about to be released by The Still Company , which is an ongoing collusion with Melbourne musician Greg Riddell. His most recent collection, The Adoption Order, was released by Five Islands Press in 2009 and short-listed for the 2010 Victorian Premiers’ Prize.

Born in Osijek, Croatia, in 1959, Tatjana Lukic studied philosophy and sociology in Sarajevo. She lived in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and the Czech Republic, before coming to Australia with her young family as a refugee in 1992. She published four acclaimed collections, published in Serbo-Croatian during the 1980s. After her arrival in Australia, she did not write poetry for almost ten years. She learned language, studied, and worked for various government departments as a researcher and data analyst. Her new poems, written in English, have been published in Australia and internationally. Tatjana Lukic died in August, 2008.

Louise Oxley was born Louise Hawker in Hobart in 1955. She has taught English as a second language for many years, both at home in Australia and overseas in France and Thailand, and now works as language and academic skills adviser to international students at the University of Tasmania.

Poems in this collection, her second, have won several national awards, including the Melbourne Poets Union and Tom Collins Prizes and the Bruce Dawe Prize in both 2004 and 2007. Her first book, Compound Eye (Five Islands Press, 2003), was commended in the Anne Elder Award. A selection of her poems appears in Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing (Bumble-bee Books, 2001) and in Wagtail 41, Sitting with Cézanne (Picaro Press, 2005). She is the Tasmanian editor for Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. She has served on Arts Tasmania advisory panels and on the Tasmanian Writers Centre board.

Sandy Fitts was born in England and grew up on the coast of Yorkshire. Her poems have been published widely and have won many awards in Australia and the UK.

‘Waiting for Goya’ won the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2007. Other first prizes include The Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition, while ‘Headgear’ (a review) was shortlisted for the Australian Book Review poetry prize. In the UK, her poems have won prizes in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize. Fitts has worked on trains and boats, in factories, cafes, schools, and in many offices. Her various university studies include an MBA. View from the Lucky Hotel is her first poetry collection to be published.

For further information check out Sandy’s website: www.fitts.info

Barry Hill is an acclaimed writer in several genres, having won Premier’s Awards for poetry, the essay and non-fiction, most recently Broken Song (2002) which also won the National Biography Award and the Tasmania Pacific Bicentenary History Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologised, and translated into Japanese and Chinese. This is his sixth collection of poetry. His first collection, Raft (1990) was runner up for the Anne Elder Award, and his second, the long narrative poem Ghosting William Buckley won the 1994 Premier’s Award. For fifteen years he was Radio Critic for The Age, and he has written many works for radio, most recently Desert Canticles in 2000, (with music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin), which was based on his third book of poetry The Inland Sea (2001). His first libretto, Love Stronger than Death, music by Andrew Schultz, was performed by The Song Company at ‘The Studio’ at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. Since 2003 his work has appeared in Black Inc’s annual Best Australian Poems. He is Poetry Editor for the national newspaper, The Australian. He lives by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria, and is married to the singer/songwriter Rose Bygrave.

Judy Johnson has published more than 300 poems in literary magazines across Australia and the UK. Many of them have won major awards, including but not limited to the John Shaw Neilson Prize, the Val Vallis Award, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (twice), the Banjo Paterson Poetry Prize (three years running), the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, and the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. She co-judged the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2004 and 2005. Her first collection, Wing Corrections, was on the Schools List in WA; her second, Nomadic, won the Wesley Michel Wright Award. Her verse novel Jack, published by Pandanus Books, won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry. Judy lives in the Lake Macquarie region of New South Wales and is currently working on a second verse novel to execute her third Australia Council grant.