Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

About Lionel Fogarty | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

by
States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

About Lionel Fogarty | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

by
States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

Lionel-Fogarty-1220x731 smaller

Lionel Fogarty was born in 1958 at Barambah, now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland. Since the 1970s he has been active in many of the political struggles, particularly in southern Queensland, from the Land Rights movement, to setting up Aboriginal health and legal services, to the issue of black deaths in custody – Fogarty's own brother, Daniel, died in police custody in 1993. His first collection of poetry, Kargun, was published in 1980, and he has published eight further collections, as well as a children's book, Booyooburra, a traditional Wakka Wakka story. Fogarty has also travelled widely in the United States and Europe. An unabashedly political poet, Fogarty's poetry employs Aboriginal English in innovative ways, challenging readers to reconfigure cultural assumptions. He is a poet who has opened up the new space of black Australian post-surrealist writing and done much to reformulate our understanding of poetic discourse and its roles in both black and white communities.

States of Poetry

'Ambition Man'

'Between Places'

'He Had a Dream of Times'

'Jealousy of the Undertow'

'Koala Trees Turn Her Borobi'

Further reading and links

'The Poetic Politics of Lionel Fogarty', poetry reading on the Australian Poetry website

Lionel Fogarty's author page on the Red Room Company website

Lionel Fogarty's author page on Poetry International website

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.