Gig Ryan’s last book was New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011), published in the United Kingdom as Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2012). Manners of an Astronaut (Hale & Iremonger, 1984) was re-issued by Shearsman Books, UK, in 2018. She was Poetry Editor of The Age from 1998 to 2016. Her work first appeared in ABR in 2001 when it began publishing new poetry. She lives in Me ... (read more)
Hidden Author
Bella Li is the author of Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017), which was commended in the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, highly commended in the 2017 Anne Elder Award, and won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry and the 2018 Kenneth Slessor Prize. Her work has been published in a range of journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems and The Kenyon Review, and displayed ... (read more)
Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collecti ... (read more)
Anita Patel has had work published in various journals including Conversations (Pandanus Press, ANU), Block 9, Burley Journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Demos Journal, Mascara Literary Review, and Not Very Quiet Journal. Her poem 'Women’s Talk' won the ACT Writers Centre Poetry Prize in 2004. She has performed her work at many events, including at the Canberra Multicultural Festival, the P ... (read more)
Mark O’Connor was born in Melbourne in 1945, and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He lives in Canberra. In 1999 he was the Australian National University’s H.C. Coombs Fellow, and thereafter a Visiting Scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. He has taught English at several universities, has published fifteen books of verse, and won many prizes and awards. His ... (read more)
Paul Munden has published five collections, most recently The Bulmer Murder (Recent Work Press, 2017) and Chromatic (UWA Publishing, 2017). He was reader for Stanley Kubrick from 1988–98, and has been Director of the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) since 1994. He has worked as conference poet for the British Council and edited Feeling the Pressure: poetry and science o ... (read more)
Miranda Lello is a Canberra poet and performer whose début poetry collection, A Song, The World To Come, was published in March 2017 by Recent Work Press. It took thirty-five years to write, and Miranda launched it on her birthday under a tree outside the National Film and Sound Archive, one of the places she loves most in Canberra. Miranda has performed regularly around Canberra over the past tw ... (read more)
Lesley Lebkowicz has been publishing poetry since the early 1980s. Her last book, The Petrov Poems (Pitt Street Poetry), won a Canberra Critics’ Circle award, was shortlisted for the 2014 ACT Book of the Year, and won the 2014 ACT Writing and Publishing Award (Poetry). She has also published a collection of short fiction Washing my Mother’s Hair, and a translation of the earliest Buddhist vers ... (read more)
Which critics most impress you?
From many possibilities in Australia and elsewhere, I choose James Wood. Given enviable space in The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Wood doesn’t waste it. His shrewd, elegant reviews show a critic at ease with diverse talents, He knows where his writers are coming from and where they’re going. Calm, scholarly, but passionate when passion is called f ... (read more)
Which poets have most influenced you?
You learn very different things from different poets, from formal aspects, some of them minute, to whole revelations about what a poem might be. This is always developing, and influences tend to come in waves or moments, with anthologies and magazines, subcultures and discoveries. But there are a lot of poets you keep going back to. You can learn from the ast ... (read more)