John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books whose many prizes and awards include The Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry from The Adelaide Festival, The Age Poetry Book of The Year Award, The Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times), a Young Australian Creative Fellowship from the former PM of Australia, Paul Keating, and senior Fellowships from the Literature Board of The Australia Council. His Poems 1980-1994 and volume of poetry The Hunt (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) were published in May 1998 by Bloodaxe, UK. His other books include The Silo (Fremantle Arts Centre Press/Arc, UK, 1995/1998), The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (Arc, UK, 1996), Visitants (Bloodaxe, 1999), Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett in 2000), and The Hierarchy of Sheep (Bloodaxe/FACP, 2001). A novel, Genre, was published in 1997 (FACP) and Grappling Eros (stories) in late 1998 (FACP). A book of autobiographical writing, Auto, was published in 2001 (Salt). He was commissioned to create a textual adaptation of Wagner’s GĂśtterdämmerung for the 2003 Perth Festival, and is the author of four verse plays (collected as Divinations).
John Kinsella is the editor of the international literary journal Salt, a Consultant Editor to Westerly (CSAL, University of Western Australia), Cambridge correspondent for Overland (Melbourne, Australia), and International Editor of the American journal The Kenyon Review. He co-edited a double issue of Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry with Joseph Parisi, a special pastoral issue of TriQuarterly with Susan Stewart, and numerous other special issues of international literary journals.
John Kinsella is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and was appointed the Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the United States for 2001, where he is now Professor of English. He is also Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, where he is a Principal of the Landscape and Language Centre. His work has been or is being translated into many languages, including French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian. His new volume is Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (selected and introduced by Harold Bloom), published in 2003 by WW Norton. Peripheral Light has been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and has won the 2004 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry; it was also a Washington Post recommended poetry book. John Kinsella is poetry critic for the Observer newspaper (UK). A volume of essays and a book of short stories (with Tracy Ryan) are forthcoming, and WW Norton and FACP will publish his The New Arcadia volume of poetry in June 2005.